Anarchism & Environmental Survival*— G. Anarchism and... · 2014. 11. 16. · ship to both...

Anarchism & Environmental

Survival*—

by Graham Purchase

Anarchism & Environmental

Survival

by

Graham Purchase

See Sharp Press ♦ Tucson, Arizona ♦ 1994

Copyright © 1994 by Grdhnni Put chase.All rights reserved.

For information contact See Sharp Press, P.O. Box 1731, Tucson, AZ 85702-1731.

Purchase, Graham.Anarchism & environmental survival / by Graham

Purchase ; introduction by Chaz Bufe. - Tucson, AZ : See Sharp Press, 1993.

160 p. ; 23 cm.Includes bibliographical references.

1. Human ecology. 2. Land use - Environmental aspects.3. Environmental policy. 4. Green movement. 5. Anarchism.6. Agricultural ecology.

ISBN: 0-9613289-8-3 304.28

First Printing

Cover graphics by Clifford Harper. Cover and interior design by Chaz Bufe. nicnoi text typeset in 11-point Baskerville. Cover typeset in Optima.

n ° n aLC‘d'free paPcr wilh *°y-b**ed ¡nk by Thomson-Shore. Inc., Dexter, Michigan.

Contents

Introduction ............................................................................................... 1

P reface ........................................................................................................ 3

The Community & the Ecological R e g io n ...............................9

The Principle o f Bioregional Federation ................................. 17

Anarchism, Chaos Theory,and the Metaphysics o f N atu re ............................................... 24

Anarcho-Syndicalism, Technology, and Ecology................... 35

Anarchism, Ecology, and Human Pop ulation ....................... 49

Anarchism 8c Social Ecology:A Critique o f Murray B o o k ch in .............................................. 57

Anarchism, Feminism, and the Green Revolution................71

Anarchism 8c Animal R ig h ts..........................................................88

Microlivestock, Economy, and Ecology.................................... 97

Wilderness and the Human Com m unity................................113

Anarchism 8c Community Self-D efense.................................. 122

Anarchist Society 8c Its Practical R ealization........................ 139

Bibliography .......................................................................................155

Introduction

U n e of the m ost consistently levelled and dam aging criticisms o f anarchists is that they lack a positive vision of the future. A m ore sophisticated and perhaps even m ore dam aging criticism is that an arch ists’ visions o f a free and egalitarian society are hopelessly utopian— that they have no idea of “how to get from h ere to th ere .” Unfortunately, many anarchists have done nothing to co u n ter these criticism s, and som e have actually m ade the situation worse by their insistence that anarchism is an anti- organizational a n d /o r anti-program m atic ideology. This is far from the truth, as a brief look at the writings o f the most outstanding anarchist theorists— Rudolf Rocker, P eter Kropotkin, E rrico M alatesta, M urray Bookchin, et al.— will show. But these dam aging and en du ring myths continue to m ar an arch ism ’s reputation.

A contributing factor to the en du ran ce o f these myths is the fact that anarchists have produced rem arkably few works over the last half century outlining positive visions o f an anarchist society. Thus, I ’m very happy that See Sharp Press is publishing this m uch -n eed ed book in which G raham Purchase outlines a radically positive, achievable vision of an ecologically integrated anarchist society; ju st as im portantly, he provides us with a num ber of practical steps necessary to the realization that vision.

In the following essays, G raham deals with virtually every im portan t issue on the anarchist and G reen agendas: bioregionalism ; technology and its effects on the environm ent; population; the organization o f work; feminism and its relationship to both anarchism and environm entalism ; chaos theory and its relation to anarchist theory; anim al rights and vegetarianism; and the social ecology of M urray Bookchin. In dealing with these m atters, G raham presents an anarchist vision which seems em inently practical— and so I believe that this book is an

2 Introduction

important step forward in convincing our fellow citizens that what Graham terms eco-anarchism is a reasonable and desirable alternative to the authoritarianism and environm ental degradation which permeate so many aspects o f daily life.

It should be emphasized, however, that in this book G raham Purchase is outlining one possible way in which society m ight be reorganized along eco-anarchist lines. It should also be em p h asized that Graham is not advocating a quick fix; if society were to choose the path he outlines, eco-social reorganization would not be an overnight process. Even in die rosiest scenario, it would take decades to undo die social dam age w rought by industrial capitalism and "communism,” and perhaps centuries to undo the environmental damage.

As well, Graham is not arguing that his vision should be imposed upon the rest of us; rather, he is offering his vision in the hope that it will serve as a road map for the voluntary reorganization of society— or, at the least, will stim ulate oth ers to reconsider their own desires about the type o f society in which they wish to live, and to work toward the realization o f their desires.

Preface

A s a result of the environm ental crisis, the once-unshakable belief that the hum an species should dom inate nature is being challenged on all sides. "Survival" has com e to m ean som ething m ore com p lex than the simplistic notion o f "survival of the fittest" o r the right o f d om in an ce by a "superior" species. Increasing num bers o f people are com ing to see that regional and planetary environm ental health , and hum an survival itself, depend upon a respectful ap proach to nature and to non-hum an life forms. We now know that healthy soils, anim als, forests, grasslands and river systems are biological necessities for hum an survival. Ecological science fu rther tells us that genetic and species diversity, not hom ogeneity, ensures the health and stability o f ecosystems, and that the health and stability o f the Karth itself can be no greater than that o f its com bined ecological regions. O u r contem porary understanding o f survival, then, and the m eans necessary to its realization, is a far cry from the individualistic struggle for existence—"N ature red in tooth and claw"—on ce depicted in elem entary biology texts. H um an survival depends not upon com petition with o th er species (and within ou r ow n), but rather upon the adoption o f cooperative and nurtu ran t ways o f life—a sustainable course o f co-evolution with all living things.

At the sam e tim e, people are increasingly looking for nongovernm ental ways to solve pressing social and environm ental problem s. T hey realize that it is everyone’s responsibility to create a green er, healthier, and m ore sustainable future for their families and com m unities. People are beginning to plant trees in suburban "green belts," to cam paign against the pollution of local rivers, and to take the time to appreciate the wildlife in their regions. T hey notice that the massive and imperialistic military and econ o m ic ventures of nation states and m ultinational corp oration s are m ore often than not harm ful to the regions in

4 Preface

which they are imposed. C orporate capitalism, from Tokyo to Berlin seems determ ined to cover the delicate eco reg .o n s o f our living planet with a universal landscape of asphalt highways, golf courses, shopping malls, and theme parks. People everyw here are realizing that our survival is dependent upon environm ental stability, and that the pathological interests of governm ents and multinational corporations pose the single biggest th reat to the

health of the Earth.Despite the m edia’s ignorant but never-ending attem pts to

depict anarchy as synonymous with chaos and d isoid er, it is becoming clearer every day that som ething new m ust rep lace the outmoded philosophy of deathly order, greed and d esu u ctio n . Anarchy—literally, simply "no state" or "without a state"—calls for the replacememt of the state and capitalism by federations of economically cooperating, ecoregionally integrated com m unities. Today, anarchism is emerging as die only credible philosophy of survival—whether it’s called "anarchism" or not. Since the collapse of the French Revolution (1 7 8 9 -1 7 9 3 ) two centuries ago , when the first true represen tad ves of anarchy (the enrages) did battle with the forces of clergy, aristocracy and capital, th ere has been an almost unending campaign to slur and m isrepresent the ideas and practices of the organized anarchist m ovem ent. W hen cities or countries are in a state of turmoil and dislocation due to political struggles, econom ic failure, or national calam ity, die journalist never fails to inform the public that "the situation has degenerated into anarchy!" (In fact, the idea that anarchy m eans disorder and chaos has becom e so en tren ch ed that it is so defined in the Oxford English Dictionary!) For this reason , m any people who understand what anarchism really stands for often reproach us for not changing the nam e of our m ovem ent to something that is not so frightening. But for m ore than a century, libertarians have called in the name of anarchy for a society that is decentralized and Green. Many thousands of people have lost

r L fighting f° r the Cause of an archism, and it would be unthinkable not to honor our intellectual ancestors who w rote, worked or were martyred under anarchy’s black banner.

Sn l i V u and Car,y 2 ° th ce" luries, Russian, A m erican ,and exe ? H k Itahan anarchists were exiled, im prisoned

ecuted by the thousands merely for expressing their

Anarchism & Environmental Survival 5

opinions. Sadly, such persecution continues in many countries today; but in m ost, ou r ideas, publications, and bookshops are at least tolerated , if officially ignored and routinely slandered. It seems as if all m ovem ents pursuing genuine and lasting change m ust go through this process, with social disapproval gradually and grudgingly giving way to accep tan ce. After all, an idea or a m ovem ent that can n o t survive at least a few centuries of persecution is in all probability not worth the bother. Anarchism has survived, and survives still.

A century ago, political theory was relatively simple, and the m eanings o f the term s "socialist," "anarchist," and "com m unist" were reasonably unam biguous. With the expansion o f the university system after W orld W ar II, though, a whole host of new political divisions and sub-divisions has arisen— seemingly dream ed up overnight by trendy academ ics anxious to secure a niche for themselves and a brand nam e under which to sell their wares in university and "progressive” bookstores.

In the 1970s we had M arxist-Leninists, Socialist-Feminists, Anarchist-Fem inists, e tc .; but with the decline of M arxism ’s appeal and the rise o f ecology, the 1980s saw a whole new range of "isms" and "ologies": Social Ecology, D eep Ecology, and Ecofem inism , for exam p le. University lecturers have produced hundreds o f articles on the D eep E cology/S ocial Ecology debate alone, and as the 1990s progress we can exp ect a further fragm entation o f intellectual thought into an ever-greater array of purportedly opposing positions. Indeed, such controversies form the ideal subject m atter for the standard academ ic article, which usually com p ares two or th ree positions on a certain subject, and discusses their various histories, strengths, and weaknesses, typically without offering anything new or creative. Thus, the social, political, and ecological debate has degenerated into an overly dram atic and inward-looking quagm ire of "isms" and "ologies"— many of which borrow ideas from anarchism .

D eep Ecology (the biological equality o f all living things), Social Ecology (the ecoregionally integrated com m unity as opposed to capitalist individualism and the nation state), and Ecofem inism (the need to repair the social and environm ental dam age resulting from patriarchal attitudes and sU uctures) are all in h eren t in anarchist philosophy. My message to the proponents

6 Preface

of all of them is, "forget your intellectual egotism and d eclare openly that you are all (am ong other things) anarchists! You should be proud to contribute to a m ovem ent that has for two centuries opposed capitalism, patriarchy, institutional h ieiaichy , and arbitrary power, advocating instead hum an-scaled, self- administered, and ecologically integrated com m unities reliant upon low-impact food, waste, transportation, and energy technologies, and envisioning a global fedeiation of lice communities. My wish is to see the various groups com e togeth er and acknowledge that no good whatsoever can com e from the fragmentation of a unified body of social, political, and ethical thinking into ever-diversifying, specialized "isms. Insofar as each hopes to achieve an ecologically integrated society in the absence of government, capitalism, and hierarchy, D eep Ecology, Social Ecology, and Ecofeminism want the same thing. T he differences between these new philosophies are like petals on the bud o f one flower, whose blooming will coincide with global h arm on y and the realization of the social and ecological revolution.

What the present power elite calls order is but one form of social order (hierarchy), and it’s a type which causes a g reat deal of environmental disorder. Far from advocating disorder, an archists argue for a new kind of order rooted in the natural ecoregional organization of life on Earth. In place o f the nation state, anarchists argue that the organization of space and place should be based upon the natural geographical region. In place of centralized government, anarchists argue that the prim ary unit of economic, social and political life should be the self-governing, self-sufficient, and ecoregionally integrated village, town o r city. In place of agribusiness, anarchists argue for a local, small-scale, permacultural approach to food production. In place o f industrial capitalism, anarchists argue for the production o f socially necessary goods and services using environmentally integrated technologies organized by workers for the benefit of themselves an of humanity, rather than for a ruling class of parasites and environmental hooligans. This is the real "new world o rd er," one which anarchists have been advocating for generations.

"TV ̂ T ^ th e.Press ,abeled the anarchist vision? "C haos!"isor er. y implication, "order" is represented by the status

quo. nine-tenths of humanity in poverty while a tiny m inority


squander the E a rth ’s resources. "O rder" is the degradation of A m erica’s agricultural lands through the m onocultural p ro duction o f wheat and cattle for the profit o f powerful corp orate elites. It is the despoliation of countless ecological regions and ecosystem s by m ultinational corporations and their governm ent lackeys. This, we are told, is good organization; and what is term ed "disorder" often refers to rebellion— in the nam e of personal and environm ental survival.

As the G reen r/ev olu tion grows apace with anarchism , there is a good ch an ce that ou r doctrines will not merely survive, but will flourish. T he essays that follow illustrate and elaborate upon this em ergin g synthesis o f politics-not-as-usual and ecology.

The Community and the Ecological Region

.L ife on Earth exists in a host o f distinct ecological regions, roughly distinguished from one an oth er by differences in topography, clim ate, drainage, and species distribution. In som e places ecological regions are fram ed by physical features such as m ountain ranges and sea coasts; in others, regional borders are less distinct. But we are so accustom ed to seeing the world as "naturally" divided into nation states that we have forgotten that national borders are artificial creations that are often unrelated to geographical boundaries. Even within nations, land is parceled up in political, co rp o rate , and individual units that ignore natural features. For exam p le, a straight line between two Arab states cuts across the middle o f a unique, well-defined desert; likewise, a ch arm in g river valley becom es unrecognizable after being divided into suburban blocks.

O ne task facing the em ergin g anarcho-environm ental m ovem en t is to reverse this trend—to abolish the nation state and to foster in its place the ecoregional com m unity. Eco-anarchists argue that the best way to preserve the health o f the Earth is to restore the integrity of its parts, and that this depends on individuals acknow ledging, nurturing, and protecting their hom e places.

People are starting to look to the past for answers. Through talking with their grandparents or looking at old photographs, both urban and rural people are realizing how m uch has been lost and are anxious to preserve what rem ains. T he knowledge that a barren and degraded block o f farm land was once an oak grove, o r that a local river on ce teem ed with cod or salm on, becom es a source of both sadness and inspiration as people b ecom e conscious of the need to restore their local regions.

10 The Community and the Ecological Region

to

we

Ultimately, only local residents will have the knowledge necessary accomplish this enorm ous task of ecoregional revitalization.If we are to reintegrate humanity with nature, it is critical that

first dismantle the nation state, which ignores ecological regions, and instead allow communities to recon stru ct social, political and econom ic life based upon local environm ental exigencies. This would eliminate both corporate in terferen ce and bureaucratic dictates from distant political bodies.

Social anarchists argue that, in the absence of the nation state, the free and ecoregionally integrated commune (or, in m ore modern terms, community) will again becom e the prim ary unit of social identification. The idea of the com m une stem s from revolutions in medieval Europe and 19th-century Fran ce, when the people in many cities attempted to regain political independence, first from the aristocracy and later from the bureaucratic and bourgeois classes. While French com m u n es ranged from small hamlets to the mighty Paris C om m u n e, they were all based on the belief that individuals’ political identification should be with the autonomous village, town, city, or ecological region (or some combination thereof).

This general prescription, of course, says little about the actual nature of communities in the coming r/evolution . For exam p le, will they be large or small? Does the integration of hum an social, economic and political life with the needs of the ecoreg ion necessarily imply the elimination of the city? Will property, labor and reward be distributed collectively or individually? B ecause these questions are the subject of intense debate in both the environmental and anarchist movements, we pause h ere to examine some of the major viewpoints and areas o f em ergin gconsensus.

One result of nationalism is that citizens have stopped thinking of cities as independent, living entities. In a world where power radiates from capitals in London, Paris and Tokyo, these potentially vibrant concentrations of human activity-villages, owns, and cities—have become mere symbols on a m ap. No

n J f " , " 1 m^ 'pe" dc,U community, the small town has been

tlfe nation r l° insie™n«"> sucker on the tentacles of the national mfrastructnre. A, the other end of the stale , the


large cities—fueled by real estate greed and ill-conceived governm ent "urban developm ent plans"—have swollen to dozens if not hundreds o f times their original size, after two centuries of m igration from countrysides ravaged by deforestation and agribusiness despoliation. They have b ecom e little m ore than am orphous expanses of grey urban biomass. A crisis in ecoregional quality has accom p an ied this crisis in civic quality, with the blanketing o f entire ecological regions in con crete and asphalt. Im porting incredible am ountss o f water, energy, and food, and spewing out like am ounts of garbage and waste into the surrounding countryside, the m odern city is no longer a com m unity but a doom ed , hum an-dom inated ecosystem which stands little o r no ch an ce of long-term survival.

T he problem s o f large cities are of central con cern to anarchists and to the newly em erging G reen City m ovem ent. Both m ovem ents ag ree on four things: 1) if the present trend toward urban drift continues, in a few years—for the first time in history— the vast m ajority o f people on Earth will live in cities; 2) the city is a natural p rod u ct o f a num erically successful, intensely social prim ate species whose m em bers have diverse intellectual, econ om ic and social needs; 3) given that hum ans appear to p refer living in cities, it is unrealistic to pretend that humanity will, at least in the sh ort run, return to an exclusively small-scale, village-type existence; and 4) given the above, every effort should be m ade to m ake cities as self-sufficient as possible in water, energy, and food, and better integrated with the ecology o f their surrounding regions. Cities are h ere, a given that we inherited from ou r forebears, and we have no choice but to deal with them as they are.

W e must, however, reject one co n cep t em braced by some G reen City p roponents—the high-tech Dom e City idea, which owes m ore to science fiction novels and space movies than to reality. Using expanding biotechnologies, it would, for exam ple, allow people to harvest "natural" wool in artificial growing m edium s, and produce bio-fuels through botano-chem ical processes, and create highly sophisticated air, water and waste recycling systems. Sealed in gigantic, transparent dom es, such cities would be self-contained, self-sustaining ecosystems, taking in nothing from the outside and em itting nothing in return.


Scattered across the globe, these densely co n cen trated hfe-support systems would hypothetically allow the rest o f n ature to return to wilderness while humanity continued to evolve in spendid isolation. Recent pilot experim ents in Am erica, such as A rizon a’s Biosphere 2, show us that certain business interests are determined to realize the Dome City con cep t, and that this science fiction fantasy could indeed b ecom e a reality. The Japanese-backed Multi-Function P o lis-a "high tech" city o f 100,000 people to be built near Adelaide, A ustralia-is an o th er dubious experim ent, though still in the planning stage.

While sealed cities are perhaps suitable for colonizing lifeless, otherwise uninhabitable places like the m oon, their p resen ce in Earth’s delicate environment—where everything m ust retu rn to the Earth for good or for ill—would at best only delay eco- degradation. And people would not likely enjoy living in them ; being part of some huge bio-machine is the stuff o f nightm ares, not of freedom and dignity. Hum ankind is part o f n atu re and cannot be isolated from it; without nature in ou r daily lives, we would become like shriveled leaves stripped from a tree.

Apart from the Dome City concept, however, the idea o f a self- sufficient and autonomous "Green City" is practicable. Local energy sources and urban horticulture, for exam p le, are already practicable but foolishly underutilized and u nderfunded. Tim es are undoubtedly changing, though, as innovators discover new ways to recycle urban wastes and develop small-scale horticultu ral techniques that could transform the m odern m egalopolis. Low- head hydro power, poultry feeding from com posted scraps, and wastewater aquaculture all represent existing "G reen City" alternatives. Social anarchists foresee an expansion o f such activities; we foresee that even inhabitants of city cen ters will one day eat vegetables and use electricity produced from the resou rces and waste of their own metropolises.

The anarchist-environmental r/evolution implies m u ch m ore an a mere transfer of political power from one group o f people

to ano er. It requires, rather, an all-encom passing mini-o ution in every city, suburb, town, and village. Even after the

po lt,ca i eration of all these com m unities is achieved— probably oug a general strike following a long period o f educational

Anarchism 8c Environmental Survival 13

and agitational work— the m ore im portant task of deconstructing and recon structin g daily life accord in g to com m unally and environm entally sound principles will rem ain. This implies that each district m ust con d u ct its own r/evolu tion and apply the ideas o f eco-anarchism to itself. R ather than relying on business or govern m en t to supply its basic needs, each com m unity will rely on itself. This will happen in any case because, in the absence of law and authority, people will have to band together to prevent and punish crim e. Com m unities will necessarily organize to provide utilities, mass transit, daycare, and a host o f o th er activities necessary to hum an life.

(Im agine for a m om en t a rejuvenated m etropolis, consisting of in d epen d en t but federated suburban com m unities separated from one an o th er by small groves o f trees. All but the m ost necessary roads and fences have been rem oved and replaced by gardens, parks, fish ponds, and small-scale recycling plants; bicycle pathways and light rail networks co n n ect the city’s suburban com m unities. This city does not try to isolate itself from nature by covering everything with asphalt; rather, it integrates itself as closely as possible into the ecology o f the surrounding region.)

T he G reen City co n cep t is not, though, central to the anarchist blueprint for achieving global environm ental harm ony; in the future, anarchists m ight decide that cities are essentially anti- ecological in nature. However, faced as we are with cities o f 20 to 30 million people (such as Tokyo and M exico City), we must begin by ch anging ou r cities—the places in which m ost people will shortly live. T hese m onstrous creations o f state capitalism ’s centralist culture will, one hopes, "wither away" with the breakdown o f centralization.

In re-creatin g the m odern city, anarchists look to the preindustrial city, such as the G reek and Sum erian city-state and the medieval E u rop ean city-com m une. We look to a period when cities were small enough to allow all their citizens to participate in im portan t decisions, but large enough to supply a cosm opolitan alternative to village life. At present, though, this cultural reason for rural depopulation and city expansion has run full circle: life in the m onotonous, faceless suburbs of the m od em m egalopolis is probably at least as boring as that in a sleepy 12th- century village. Luckily, the developm ent o f fast and efficient


com m unication systems means that small-community lifestyles no longer necessitate the cultural isolation of previous eras.

In areas with very fragile environments, it may well be that small-village, isolated, and even nom adic lifestyles may be the most appropriate ways of human life. The existence o f at least two million villages in the world today is evidence that tin. m ral community is still viable. The self-sufficient G reen City is not intended to supplant villages, but rather to take the pressure off rural areas and to make the city m ore livable. If the city could become self-sufficient in the production of food and m ost o th er necessities, it would allow rural people to con cen trate on activities other than monocultural food production. Freed from the monotony of bulk food production, the rural population would have more time to devote to restoring and en h an cin g the seriously degraded soil. In addition, by easing pressure upon surrounding areas, a less dependent city would help save the remaining pockets of wilderness. This is im portant in that the wilderness has provided the raw material for "civilization," and it is still the only repository of the genetically variable wild "seed bank" necessary for true environmental reconstruction.

Unfortunately, since the industrial revolution, rural life in the West has becom e as endangered as the few rem aining pockets of wilderness. In England, the rural econom y has alm ost com pletely broken down; the nouveau riche have bought up the quaint cottages that the locals can no longer afford. Having run ou t of bargains close to London, the rich are busily buying ab and on ed

farms and cottages across the channel in Brittany and N orm andy. Meanwhile, in villages of countries like G reece and F ran ce , only the great grandm others rem ain—their children and ch ild ren ’s children having left long ago for Athens or Paris.

Social anarchists hope that the developm ent of urban-agrarian environments within the shell of the decaying m egalopolis will e iminate (or at least diminish) the arrogance that city dwellers often feel toward rural people. People in the city will, one hopes, learn to re-value the experience of "eating fresh strawberries while watching chickens fossicking at d aw n "-n ot as part of a "country holiday p ackage,' but as part of everyday urban life

But what of the idea of starting completely anew, of intentional


rural com m unities? Since the advent of civilization, people have founded alternative com m unities in the wilderness, far away from the corrup ting influences of the city. Such com m unities certainly existed in an cien t G reece; likewise, medieval Christians attem pted in m uch the sam e way to create the "pure Christian life" in the splendid isolation o f the m onastery. The deeply felt need to create a "new world" was the source of the "pioneer spirit" in the U.S. and C anada (never mind the dismal results of this "spirit"). Similarly, in the 18th and 19th centuries num erous political and religious groups, including the Russian Nihilists and some E uropean anarchists, attem pted to create "ideal com m unities" in rem ote areas o f Siberia, Latin Am erica, and rural Europe. The vast m ajority o f these experim ents failed rath er quickly, and most o f those that survived did so because they allowed themselves to b ecom e com pletely dom inated by a single individual, whose charism atic personality kept dissent to a m inim um .

A d h eren ce to a particular social and political vision is not in itself a viable basis upon which to build a lasting comm unity. Thus, although som e o f the m ore successful small-scale "intentional" com m unities later grew into small towns or cities (e .g ., Saskatoon, in cen tral Canada, founded as a tem perance colony), these towns soon becam e m uch the sam e as o th er towns, with little or no awareness o f the original philosophical, political or religious reasons which m otivated their founding. Even when com m unities such as the M ennonites and Dukhobors in Canada su cceed ed in p erpetuating their identity, they rem ained isolated in self-contained rural com m unities, and can hardly be said to have significantly influenced the wider society.

In m odern times, the hippie experim ents of the 1960s were inspired by a vision o f free and ecologically integrated com m unities outside m ainstream society. Again, many o f these rural and wilderness com m unities failed due to isolation, internal disagreem ent, disorganization, lack of money, bad luck, or com binations thereof. T he few that survived have typically done so by replacing their original practices o f com m unal pooling of land and o th er resources with m ore individualistic patterns, such as single-family dwellings and hom esteading. Som e of the most dedicated and level-headed "back to the landers" have m anaged, through sheer hard work and m uch good fortune, to make a


success of life in the countryside, and have also m ade a real impact upon the culture, agriculture and ecology o f their chosen regions.

The accomplishments of this back-to-the-land m ovem ent have been extremely haphazard, though; at best, its exp erim en ts only represent small and isolated pockets of resistance in a ju n g le of ignorance and corporate bulldozers. If city people want to move to the country and enjoy rural life, they can often attain the individual inner joy alluded to by poets, but the belief that by doing so they are laying the seeds of the "New Society" is an illusion. Rural comm unal experim ents have had little influence on the inhabitants of cities, where the majority of people now (or shortly will) live. The point is that the "free society" can n o t be created in isolation from the mainstream urban cu ltu re—rather, it must be created within it, rising like a green Phoenix ou t o f the ash-phalt of the megalopolis.

The Principle of Bioregional Federation

I n advocating regional organization and the self-governing com m unity, we are not claim ing that the transition from the nation state will be simple. O ne of the m ajor problem s is that existing social, environm ental, and econ om ic difficulties frequently originate outside the com m unity; so, they can n ot be solved at purely local levels. Thus the need for federation, the subject of this essay.

An exam p le may clarify the m atter. T he chem ical soup known as the Danube originates in Switzerland and passes through m ore than half a dozen countries. T he problem of cleaning up its pollution has, unfortunately, been dum ped on the downstream countries, despite the fact that they did not create the mess. This problem is com p ou nd ed by the fact that the towns and cities along the river’s banks are controlled by seven different centralized state bureaucracies. Given the im portance o f this m ajor watershed to the ecology o f E urope, the sanest way to address the D anube’s problem s would be to form a federation of all the com m unities along its banks. Although cohesion am ong such a diverse grou p would be difficult to achieve, it makes much m ore biological sense to unify around this com m on geographical feature than to continue the fruitless nationalistic bickering now taking place.

In a m etaphorical analysis of the global water (hydrological) cycle titled The Story o f the Brook, anarchist geograp h er Elisee Reclus suggests the direction in which hum anity and nature must evolve with one an oth er:

Peoples mix with other peoples like brooks with other brooks,rivers with rivers; sooner or later they will form a single nation, just

as all the waters of the same basin finish by merging into a single river. . . . Humanity, until now divided into distinct currents, will be no more than a single river and, reunited into a single flow, we will descend together toward the great sea where all life will lose itself and be renovated.1

Social anarchists clearly do not call for com plete sell-snifu it ni\ or community isolation; rather, they recom m end that society be organized from the bottom up, based upon the natuial biogeography of the Earth. Any resulting federations would be voluntary associations of local groups form ed to address com m on needs and problems. This principle lies at the heart of anarchist organization: in place of centralization, anarchism calls for the federalization of all dimensions of hum an activity-cultural, social, econom ic, political, recreational, and environmental.

This principle of federation is based upon observable processes in nature and society. It was first introduced as a political and econom ic concept by the early 19th-century anarchist P.J. Proudhon, then integrated into anarcho-evolutionary theory later in that century by Peter Kropotkin in his book, M utual Aid. Although he did not deny the role of com petition, Kropotkin stressed the im portance of cooperation and interdependence in the evolution of biological life. Recent theory in ecology and evolutionary biology has confirm ed the essential truth of Kropotkin’s assertion that cooperation is m ore im portant than competition in the evolution of living organisms. For exam ple, we cannot easily digest our food without the presence of certain bacteria in our guts, which in turn derive benefits from their presence there (a relationship known as symbiosis). Conscious or not, cooperation is a tactic that has been successfully adopted by a large proportion of animals and plants—dolphins, hum ans, elephants, and wolves are all exam ples of social species for whom the necessity of cooperation has led to increased intelligence.

The massive development of science in the late 20th century has led to new and exciting hypotheses about the developm ent of life on Earth. The theory of mutual aid first proposed by Kropotkin is most dramatically illustrated in new discoveries in microbiology. The extraordinary patterns of inform ation exchange and symbiotic development am ong m icroscopic bacterial life are truly astonishing, and certainly deserve attention

18 The Principle o f Bioregional Federation


from the general public and anarchists alike. In their book, Microcosmos: Four Billion Years o f Evolution from our Microbian Ancestors, Lynn Margulis and Dorian Sagan argue convincingly for the centrality o f cooperative processes in the evolution of life on Earth .

Even though life has existed on Earth for over three billion years, for the first half of that time the only life forms were simple, unn u cleated cells which survive today as bacteria. Thus, for over a billion years after the advent of life, the Earth was covered with nothing but steam ing pools of brightly colored m icrobes. T he study o f fossilized rocks and bacterial reproduction has revealed that n ot only has bacterial life been around for m uch longer than previously thought, but also that symbiosis and federation figured centrally in the evolution of life.

Bacterial cells are very simple organism s, with perhaps 300 times fewer genes than the nucleated cells of which we are com posed. They com pensate for this deficiency by freely exch an gin g tiny scraps of DNA am ong themselves and by digesting o th er bits o f DNA from nearby dam aged or dying cells. With their ability to create genetic variation by swapping tiny bits o f m atter "horizontally," bacteria can respond to environm ental changes with great rapidity. Such efficient patterns of intraspecies symbiosis are evident in b acteria’s now all-too-com m on resistance to penicillin and o th er antibiotics. (O n the o th er hand, without bacteria to recycle ou r organic waste, the biosphere would cease to exist.)

They developed these capabilities, Margulis and Sagan suggest, as a defense against both high levels of solar ultraviolet radiation and volatility in the E a rth ’s crust three to four billion years ago (due to volcanic eruptions and m eteor im pacts). In ord er to deal with continual dam age from a life-hostile environm ent, bacteria were forced to adapt—to learn the trick of repairing themselves from bits and pieces of the decaying cells around them . The collective response o f unicellular bacterial life over billions of years o f evolution has thus been to develop the potential for a flexible, near-instantaneous (in evolutionary term s) exch ange of genetic inform ation-ultim ately leading to b acteria’s ability to regulate the chem ical and organic com position o f the biosphere for their own benefit.

Although Margulis and Sagan do not use the term social anarchism" in their analysis, Bakunin, Kropotkin or M alatesta would almost certainly have con cu rred with their conclusions about the "decentralized," "self-regulating, social and d em ocratic" nature of bacterial life:

As we move from a purely medical view of microbes to an understanding of them as our ancestors, as planetary elders, oui emotions also change, from fear and loathing to lespect and awe. Bacteria invented fermentation, the wheel in the form of the proton rotary motor, sulfur breathing, photosynthesis, and nitrogen fixation, long before our evolution. They are not only highly social beings, but behave as a sort of worldwide decentralized democracy. Cells basically remain separate, but can connect and trade genes with organisms of even exceedingly different backgrounds. Realizing that human individuals also remain basically separate but can connect and trade knowledge with very different others may be taking a step toward the ancient wisdom of the microcosm.2

Margulis and Sagan suggest that worldwide com puter-assisted information exchange networks and oth er m utual aid associations are the most recen t manifestation of symbiotic evolution. They see these trends as evidence for a universal tendency toward reciprocity, mutual aid, and "strength-in-unity." T heir book con cludes with a passionate appeal for global environm ental cooperation com bined with a vaguely form ulated vision of freely federating comm unities linked by com plex networks of information exchange. This vision has m uch in com m on with that of many prom inent 19th century anarchist thinkers, notably Elisee Reclus and Peter Kropotkin (see Kropotkin’s The Place o f Anarchism in Socialistic Evolution).

Anarchists argue that rather than am eliorating conflict in human society, governm ent has underm ined the natural potential for intercom m unal and social cooperation by creating inappropriate and socially alienating centralized power structures. The world has been artificially divided into mutually hostile states, many with vast military arsenals, with the United Nations the only solution proferred by national governments to date. It is difficult to say whether this body’s current ineffectiveness or its potential



strength as a coercive world governm ent represents the greater th reat to hum an survival. Social anarchists do not believe that a handful o f bum bling officials playing God can ever hope to understand, let alone efficiently adm inister, ou r enorm ously com p lex social-ecological world. As we have seen, organic life developed by m eans of a non-centralized and self-organizing process of local adaptation. Large-scale, centralized hum an power structures h eaded by power-hungry generals, corp orate bosses, and political hacks run con trary to natural evolutionary trends.

Social anarchists recognize that non-governm ental and voluntary organizations are already vitally im portant and pervasive com p on ents o f hum an social life. Every day, thousands of associations form and dissolve— social clubs, food cooperatives, carpools, playgroups, support groups, scientific and professional bodies, literary and artistic circles, bicycle clubs, fitness groups, and m any others. Indeed, in every period and in every culture m em bers o f ou r species have associated, coop erated and federated with one an oth er on the basis of mutual interest and co n cern -w ith ou t feeling the slightest need for governm ental con trol o r coord in ation. Today, a vast pool o f non-governm ental and non-capitalist groups thrive in all areas o f hum an life. Some ad hoc organizations last only a few days in ord er to m eet the needs o f the m om ent, while others cross oceans and develop into p erm an en t, international federations. Anarchists hope that the eventual d isappearance of capitalism and the nation state will allow the full federative potential of ou r species to flower. For eveiy hum an n e e d -e co n o m ic , social, spiritual and recre ational— som e organization spontaneously develops.

Indeed, the m od ern com m unications and technological revolutions m ake the anarchist vision of a global federation of self- governing bioregions even m ore practicable than when first proposed over a century ago. Such bioregions would be linked by com p lex com m unication networks con nectin g a m ultitude of freely evolving m utual aid associations designed to m eet hum an needs that could n ot be m et at the level o f the com m unity.

This process is already occu rrin g in many places. T he “Tanam i D escent Aboriginal Artists Network,” creating satellite linkages am on g widely dispersed artists across N orthern Australia’s vast deserts, has now been exp and ed to link widespread tribal units,


and is even being transm itted to som e of their m em bers in jail. Similarly, the em erging “com p u ter cottage phen om en on in the United Kingdom, whereby com panies parcel out work to individuals who live in the countryside, has recently gained m uch media attention. Radio School in Australia and the O pen University in the U.K., although not viable, long-term substitutes for schools and universitites, have nevertheless successfully educated isolated or busy people for many years.

The triumph of com m unity and bioregion so necessary to the survival of our planet will require new (and, paradoxically, ancient) forms of organization. Social anarchists believe that federalism is a natural (and easily observable) form o f organization that will m eet hum an needs m uch m ore efficiently than have the centralized state administrative pyramids o f the past.

“Think globally, act locally" is unquestionably the slogan that encapsulates the direction that hum an consciousness and activity must take. The kind of feeling that one has for o n e ’s ecoregion is qualitatively different from that which one has for o n e ’s country. “Love” of the nation state is the result of displaced kin loyalties, historical conquest, centralized dom ination over the local region, and lifelong exposure to nationalistic propaganda. Bioregional consciousness, on the other hand, results from the deeply felt human need for a sense of place, a sense of hom e. While nationalism has been a major obstacle to the realization of global environmental consciousness, the need to care for the land is an ethic that admits of no borders. In the act of caring for o n e’s bioregion, one is at the same time caring for the planet and for the good of all beings. That is, acting locally involves not only thinking but acting globally.

It is obvious that the only organic and harm onious way to solve our global problems is to dissolve both the nation state and the United Nations. This is not to say that many of the functions which the United Nations performs are not necessary, but that they could be, and in some case already are, duplicated by nongovernmental organizations. Organizations like the Red Cross impartially provide health care whenever and wherever needed; OxFam likewise helps the poorest women and children throughout the world. Non-governmental environmental groups

Anarchism Sc Environmental Survival 23

such as G recn p cace m on itor and expose environm ental abuses around the globe. W orld cultural, sporting, and scientific associations investigate and participate in an im m ense variety of m atters. All o f this exists as part o f the social infrastructure. Social anarchists hope that with the rise o f telecom m unications the n um ber and influence of global mutual-aid networks will increase a thousandfold. We foresee countless groups created for peace, arbitration, and for all m an n er o f cultural and scientific pursuits which will effectively ensure global cooperation. At that point th ere will be no need for an artificial and potentially totalitarian world governm ent, or for the United Nations.

T he idea that hum an settlem ent should begin at the level of the little brook, then federate along river basins or watersheds, all o f which eventually jo in in the ocean , the source of all life, represents the m ode of traditional hum an settlem ent—witness the growth o f hum an com m unity along the Nile and Yellow rivers. It is an idea found in the works o f all the great philosophers and in m any of the great religions o f the world. The fundam ental contribution o f the anarchist geographers was to insist that, if it was to achieve harm ony with the Earth , hum an political organization m ust abandon centralized control and instead organize the flow o f hum an life along natural geographic features.

1. quoted by Garry Dunbar in Elisee Reclus, p. 52.

2. Margulis and Sagan, p. 96.

Anarchism, Chaos Theory, and the Metaphysics of

Nature

H istorically , anarchists have all too often been written off as advocates of chaos and disorder. Although this is, and always has been, far from the case, anarchists have characteristically been fascinated by the complexity of spontaneous natural o rd er. This preoccupation has been largely vindicated with the developm ent of m odern chaos theory. O f course, this vindication is m itigated by the fact that one cannot directly equate hum an social interactions with mathem atical theories, but the findings o f chaos theorists are very suggestive nonetheless.

People have always noticed the entrancing, strangely organized swirling patterns displayed by smoke passing through a ray of sunlight. It is, however, only recently that we have developed com puters capable of mathematically simulating and m apping the patterning of such com plex dynamic systems—where every swirl of smoke affects the next in a never-ending orgy of integration and disintegration. Until m achines were capable of perform ing the staggering num ber of com putations necessary to mathem atically understand com plex order, we were simply unaware of this fascinating area of m odem mathem atics. Com plex self o rd er officially didn’t exist until quite recently, because it was scientifically beyond proof. W hether these com puter-generated programs really match the com plex reality of a living environm ent is, of course, questionable. But experim ents simulating the evolution of com plex order from a very large num ber of a few different types of simple units, initially using a small num ber of very basic program m ed rules, have produced intriguing results.


In recen t years, com puter-assisted m athem aticians have attem pted to sim ulate the evolution of life. They do this by placing short strings o f letters in various com binations, with varying catalytic and reaction strengths assigned to each letter, each of which is capable o f spontaneouslyjoining up with one an oth er to form longer chains. These simple chains of letters are designed to m im ic small m olecular chains o f living m atter reacting with one an oth er in the “primeval soup.” C om puter-generated “auto- catalytic set sim ulation for the origins of life” suggests that a critical level o f com plexity was achieved in the “soup” by the lengthening o f long strings o f interacting polymers, eventually closing the loops and form ing themselves into self-organizing webs. It seem s that when systems reach a certain critical level of self-organized com plexity, they are capable o f undergoing qualitative and irreversible ch ange in the direction of ever-greater levels o f com p lex and cooperative order:

T raditional biochem istry has generally dissected life down to the last m olecule and broken life down into its basic com ponents, rath er than attem pting to understand how they cam e together in the first place. C om p uter-gen erated environm ents are doing the latter; they artificially sim ulate the synthesis of life using electronically and m athem atically gen erated molecule-symbols program m ed with simple rules u nd er conditions favorable to the developm ent o f com p lex self organization—without actually p rogram m in g the com p lex result.

Scientists d o n ’t claim to be actually producing life, o f course. T he developm ent o f com p lex webs out o f single random strings represents at best a kind o f artificial proto-organism , incapable of rep rod u cin g. T he com p u ter p rogram m er program s the different “boids” o r “m olecules” to act in a particular way and alters the environm ent to see how they react individually and collectively to varying conditions. C om plex patterns of dynamic ord er are not com parable to an organism , as they do not need nutrition, and are n eith er capable o f producing offspring nor of genetically en coding them with the sam e simple rules of behavior with which they have initially been p rogram m ed. R ather, what scientists claim to have shown is that “life is not a property o f m atter per se, but the dynamical self organization of that m atter. Its operating principle is that the laws o f life must be laws o f dynamical form ,

26 Anarchism, Chaos Theory, and the Metaphysics o f Nature

independent of the details of a particular carbon-based chem istry that happened to arise here on Earth four billion years ago. . . . The idea of viewing life in terms of its abstract organization is perhaps the single most com pelling vision of the scien ce of

com plexity."1Although the actual details of a dynamic pattern can n o t be

ascertained in advance, com plex ord er can be pred icted to em erge somewhere at the “transition point between simple o rd er and absolute chaos. This claim is supported, in my view, by the fact that dynamic organization can be scientifically m easured through means oth er than com puter-generated systems. Ilya Prigoigine (winner of the 1977 Nobel Prize in physics for his work on dynamic non-linear systems) suggested in his book, Order Out o f Chaos, that if you placed millions of ping pong balls in an enorm ous tank and blew air through them , they could eventually begin to develop orderly and com plex patternings if we were lucky enough to reach a certain level of criticality.

M. Mitchell W aldrop reports on a similar exp erim ent u n d ertaken by Danish-born physicist Per Bak, who observed the action of dropping sand onto sand piles. Bak concluded that any mass of “simples,” if they achieve a certain level or fluidity and ord er, can “move spontaneously to self-organized criticality.” T he results of Bak’s experim ents have also been successfully sim ulated on a com puter screen. Following from these conclusions, W aldrop claims that:

The most surprising lesson we have learned from simulating complex physical systems on computers is that complex behavior need not have complex roots. Indeed, tremendously interesting and beguilingly complex behavior can emerge from collections of extremely simple components. . . . The way to achieve lifelike behavior is to simulate populations of simple units instead of one big complex unit. Use local control instead of global control. Let the behavior emerge from the bottom up, instead of being specified from the top down. And while you’re at it, focus 011 ongoing behavior instead of the final result, as living systems never really settle down. By taking this bottom-up idea to its logical conclusion, you could see it as a new and thoroughly scientific version of vitalism-the ancient idea that life involves some kind of energy, force, or spirit, that transcends mere matter. The fact is


that life does transcend mere matter, not because living systems are animated by some vital essence operating outside the laws of physics anil chemistry, but because a population of simple things following simple rules of interaction can behave in eternally surprising ways.2

As an anarchist and a rationalist, I feci trem endously excited by m odern chaos theory in that it claims to have shown that com plex self-order is not created by God, but rather creates itself, developing from the simple to the com plex rather than from the com p lex (god ) to the simple. But as an anarchist I can n ot help but feel disgusted that these observations are credited to Adam Smith and to the quasi-religious notion o f vitalism; om itted are Bakunin and Kropotkin, both of whom argued that life and society are self-organized and should be left to organize “from the bottom u p,” in harm ony with the peculiarities o f local social and environm ental conditions.

Such is the state o f m odern science— chaos is all the rage. Anarchists have been accused o f advocating chaos for two centuries, but despite all the hoopla about this extrem ely interesting area of m athem atics and environm ental science, scant attention has been paid by scholars to anarchism ’s contribution to chaos theory. T he great 18th century utopian philosopher Charles Fou rier ccrtainly exp lored a great many of the social im plications of environm ental diversity and com plexity in his writings. And it is through exploring K ropotkin’s philosophical writings on natural o rd er (which owe an im m ense debt to Fou rier) that I wish to redress this shameful gap in the scholarship o f the history o f m odern chaos theory.

Noncentralized Organization Versus Centralized Organization

Many people still believe that organization and stability must be the result o f som e central organ, som e centrally con centrated source o f organizational force. This power, they think, must be em bodied either individually, in the tribal ch ief or patriarchal father, o r centrally, in the state. They believe that nature and the universe are organized by G od, the tribe by its chief, society by


die state, and the body by the brain. Natural, societal, and bodily organization must, it is assumed, be con centrated , en forced , and imposed by some om nipotent being or centrality. Society, without some concentrated organizational force or nervous system “radiating from Paris or from Berlin as far as the m ost rem ote game keeper, and ruling the most distant ham let by ord ers itom the capital" will, it is thought, simply disintegrate (K ropotkin, Revolutionary Studies). In Anarchism: Its Philosophy an d Ideal, Kropotkin discusses the role of astronom y in the evolution o f this

belief:

There was a lime when man imagined the earth placed in the center of the universe. Sun, moon, planets and stars seemed to roll round our globe: and this globe inhabited by man represented folium the center of creation.

An immense change in all conceptions of the civilized part of mankind was produced in the sixteenth century, when it was demonstrated that, far from being the center of the universe, the earth was only a grain of sand in the solar system . . .

Take any work on astronomy of the last [18th] century. You will no longer find in it our liny planet placed in the center of the universe. But you will meet at every step the idea of a central luminary—the sun—which by its powerful attraction governs our planetary world. From this central body radiates a force guiding the course of the planets, and maintaining the harmony of the system. Issued from a central agglomeration, planets have, so to say, budded from it. They owe their birth to this agglomeration; they owe everything to the radiant star that represents it still: the rhythm of their movements, their orbits set at wisely regulated distances, the life that animates them and adorns their surfaces. And when any perturbation disturbs their course and makes them deviate from their orbits, the central body re-establishes order in the system; it assures and perpetuates its existence.

This conception, however, is also disappearing as the other [Earth-centered] one did. After having fixed all their attention on the sun and the large planets, astronomers are beginning to study now the infinitely small ones that people the universe. And they discover that the interplanetary and interstellar spaces are peopled and crossed in all imaginable directions by little swarms of matter, mvisibile, infinitely small when taken separately, but all-powerful in their numbers. . . .

The whole aspect of the universe changes with this new


conception. The idea of force governing the world, preestablished law, preconceived harmony, disappears to make room for the harmony that Fourier had caught a glimpse of: the one which results from the disorderly and incoherent movements of numberless hosts of matter, each of which goes its own way and all of which hold each in equilibrium.

W hen we study the ecology of a natural system, be it a rainforest, a coral reef, or a grassland, we perceive neither internal n or external con centrations o f organizational force; there is no king o f the ju n gle , no lord over n ature—there is only interaction. For exam ple, the forest is a natural and com plex web o f alliance and antagonism , cooperation and conflict, symbiosis and dom inance. In a forest, a particular fungus grows upon the rootlets of a particular tree, each giving and receiving in turn the nutrients they require. O ne animal specializes in eating the fruits o f a specific species of plant, thereby helping spread thousands of seeds. Two species are in constant conflict for resources, from which conflict a third species benefits, etc.

N atural systems at whatever level—even the biosphere itself— m ust be rep resen ted as dynamic organizational configurations, as stabilities o f en orm ou s com plexity, in which life “without being subordinated to a central o rgan ” is held in a subtle balance of conflict and interrelationship. Organizational force is dissipated and widely dispersed within a vast web o f separate yet interd epen d en t interactions.

Indeed, the very stability of a natural system develops and m aintains itself precisely because there is no overriding or co n cen trated m onopoly o f organizational power. Each individual or species adapts its behavior to the dictates of an entire en vironm ent—the needs, energies, and habits of countless others. “E a ch ,” Kropotkin argues, “reacts on all the oth ers.”3 Everything is adapted, ord ered , and organized for everything else.

Kropotkin does not com m it himself here to a naive “holistic” outlook in which nature is regarded as a seamless and unbroken whole. H e does not con ten d that stability is the result of a fixed web o f coop eration and symbiotic interrelations. Nor does Kropotkin idealize nature, for in nature areas of sustained in terconn ected n ess and symbiosis are typically counterposed by areas o f “reactio n ,” “conflict,” and “opposition.”

30 Anarchism, Chaos Theory, and die Metaphysics o f Nature

Stability is not represented as an unbroken unity, but la th i i as homeostasis—a continuous ‘adjustm ent and a fugitive equilibrium” in which a “multitude of . . . autom om ous tendencies .

balance and oppose one an oth er continually. 1 Stability is a volatile disequilibrium held in balance through an ongoing interaction of diverse, and often autonom ous, energies.

Internal Over External Organization

For many centuries, W estern political and social theorists regarded a strong and external organizational force to be a necessary precondition for natural order. Rather than crediting the internal processes of nature itself for this ord er, they believed that it was created by an external deity that was above and outside nature. The theory of evolution destroyed this notion forever. Biospheric homeostasis, far from being the prod uct o f som e mysterious, unknown force or authority, is now known to be the evolutionary result of an infinitely com plex and astoundingly long process of self-organization.

Kropotkin’s concept of com plex self-regulation lies at the h eart of our m odern conception of natural process and stability. W hen we wish to preserve a piece of unspoiled wilderness, we do not begin by externally imposing some unnecessary o rd er on it; rather, we automatically accept that it is internally self-organizing, and we accordingly attem pt to disturb it as little as possible.

This principle of local self-regulation, Kropotkin believed, characterized not only large-scale organizational processes (e.g. the subtle rhythms of the seasons, the equilibrium of a rainforest, or the biospheric m aintenance of sufficient oxygen), but was also observable in the smallest particles of organized living m atter. For exam ple, the hum an blood cell, though only a small part of a much larger and infinitely m ore com plex entity, nevertheless exhibits some recognizable degree of self-organization. Indeed, even the smallest com ponents of individual cells are, by virtue of their surrounding m em branes, capable of regulating the flow of cellular nutrients, water, and wastes.

Building on his understanding of natural process, Kropotkin concluded that, in human society, the state is an unnatural entity.


For, although statist historians continually p rom ote the idea that the historical function o f the state has been that o f benevolent organizer o f som e dark and primitive pre-social chaos, in reality its developm ent has been intimately depen d en t upon the suppression and ultim ate elim ination of local, independent social life. T o successfully fulfill its role, the state must first establish itself as the prim ary m eans of organization. The imposition of external state con trol thus necessitates the suppression of the local region or com m unity. Even today, m inorities and ind epen d en t com m unities do not willingly give up their autonom y to the state; rather, they are forced to do so.

E xtern al organization is nearly always alienated from the natural and social systems upon which it tries to impose control. It is incapable o f integrating itself with such systems’ unique, and often highly com p lex, internal dynamics. Such alienation leads to m isunderstanding, indifference, and intolerance. Subtle divergences and intricate internal associations are understood as sym ptom atic o f chaos, rath er than as evidence o f internal order. Thus com plexity is confused with disorder, variety with chaos, and uniqueness with defiance.

This confusion is what motivates the process o f external classification and the imposition o f uniformity. W hat is internally at variance with the state’s im posed ord er must be repressed, leveled, and, if possible, eventually elim inated by brutalizing, external enforcem ent-alw ays tyrannical, if not literally destructive.

Organization: From the “Simple” to the “Complex”

Instead of organizing society in a hierarchical fashion “from the top downwards,” Kropotkin advocates the internal and horizontal organization o f society “from the bottom upwards.” He relies on the “sim ple” self-organization o f particular localities, suggesting that such local units organize themselves through “free fed eration ” into appropriately “com p lex” levels of organization as n eeded . In acco rd with this natural principle of local and internal organization, anarchists aim at the total abolition o f the state. In K ropotkin’s words, the state should be replaced by “social organization from the simple to the com plex by means of free


federation of popular forces . . . according to m utual agreem en t and to the infinitely varied, ever-changing needs o f each locality.

Fluidity Over Rigidity

For Kropotkin, spontaneity and turbulence were the two hallmarks of a living and developing system. He saw the universe in a continual state of flux; nature could not be conceived or represented as a static and unchangeable order. T he organization of life necessitated an ongoing and spontaneous adaptation to the ever-modified demands of continued evolutionary ch ange. Likewise, if human society is to rem ain vital and healthy, it has to continually develop and adapt:

. . . The idea of stability, which was hitherto attached to everything which man saw in nature, is broken down, destroyed and put to naught! Everything changes in nature, everything [is] incessantly modified: . . . planets, climates, varieties of plants and animals, the human species—Why should human institutions perpetuate themselves?. . . What we see around us is only a passing phenomenon which ought to modify itself, because immobility would be death. These are the conceptions to which modern science accustoms us.

But this conception dates almost from yesterday. . . . So much was the idea of immobility, of stability in nature, rooted in the mind [of medieval “man”] as in this epoch today continual change, evolution, is one of the most popular terms.6

. . . The life of society we understand, not as something completed and rigid, but as something never perfect, something ever striving for new forms in accordance with the needs of the time. This is what life is in nature.7

Kropotkin recognizes the inadequacies of fixed and unalterable social laws and looks forward to

. . . a society to which pre-established forms, crystallized by law, are repugnant; which looks for harmony in an ever-changing and ugiuve equilibrium between a multitude of varied forces and

mtluences of every kind."


Diversity Over Uniformity or Homogeneity

Although a great deal of scholarly and intellectual attention has been focused upon K ropotkin’s m utual aid theory, he never intended the theory to provide a com prehensive accou nt of bio- historical developm ent. Mutual aid was but “one factor” am ong many, and in any case was merely intended to serve as an exaggerated and rhetorical rejoinder to the Social Darwinist assertion that fierce, individualistic conflict represented the prim ary m echanism o f evolution and progress. The history of social and biological evolution, Kropotkin claim ed—and here he was far ah ead o f his time—was not com parable to a m arching colum n with a single, overriding direction. Rather, it was better ch aracterized as a multi-faceted developm ent resulting from the growth o f diverse and often conflicting tendencies. The evolution o f life was n ot the prod uct of a small set of unalterable evolutionary laws or m echanism s, but rather an ongoing and probabilistic process necessarily involving degrees of uniqueness, spontaneity, and irreversability.

Kropotkin saw the natural disposition toward spontaneity and variation, like the tendency of life at all levels to engage in cooperative and symbiotic behavior, to be o f particular relevance to an arch ist philosophy. Variation provides the material for evolutionary ch an ge and adaptation, and leads to the developm en t o f new species, through the processes o f recom bination and m utation, and new ways o f surviving in a constantly changing world. W ithout variation and change, nature becom es static, im m obile, and lifeless. Kropotkin exclaim s, “Variety, conflict even, is life; uniform ity is d eath .”''

T h e stress which Kropotkin places on variation and diversification in nature is entirely consistent with m odern con cepts o f evolutionary biology. Although some still regard cultural and biological evolution as steady, unidirectional progressions of ascension and elim ination, leading to the eventual dom inance of a single, superior species or culture, most scientists now see evolution as, simply, ch an ge—usually toward greater adaptation, com plexity, and diversity.

84 Anarchism, Chaos Theory, and the Metaphysics of Nature

Kropotkin suggests in the 1898 preface to Fields, Factories and Workshops that the organization of life “from the bottom upwards," “according to the infinitely varied and ever-changing needs of each locality,” would create a cu ltu ral/en viron m en tal m osaic that would be m ore integrated with regional ecological variation, allowing for a m ore balanced and environm entally sustainable relationship with the natural world.

This view stem m ed from his sophisticated u nderstanding of evolution and of the com plex, self-regulating natural world— and it’s a view in perfect accord with m odern chaos theory.

1. Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge o f Order and Chaos, by M. M itchell Waldrop. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992. pp. 241-242.2. Ibid., pp. 279-280.

3. Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Ideal, p. 120.4. Ibid., p. 119.5. Ibid., p. 133.

6. Revolutionary Studies.

7. Modem Science and Anarchism.

8. Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Ideal.9. Ibid., p. 143.

Anarcho-Syndicalism, Technology and Ecology

I n an anarchist society, the absence o f centralized state authority will perm it a radically new integration of nature, labor, and culture. As the social and ecological revolution progresses, national boundaries will b ecom e cartographical curiosities, and divisions based upon differences in geography, clim ate, and species distribution will re-em erge. This essay addresses the question o f what role unionism will play in these changes.

First, it seem s obvious that telecom m unications, transportation, and postal networks all require organization which extends far beyond the individual ecological region, and activities like road building between com m unities require coop erad on beyond that o f individual locales. Thus, a return to a comm unity-based lifestyle need n ot and can n o t imply a return to the isolation o f the walled medieval city or peasant village.

Anarcho-syndicalists (that is, anarchist unionists) argue that the best way to address such needs is for the "workers of the world" to cease prod ucing for capitalist elites and their political allies. Instead, they should organize to serve hum anity by creating not only com m un ication and transportation networks, but industrial, service, and agricultural networks as well, in ord er to ensure the continued production and distribution of goods and services.

Yet th ere are many people in anarchist and radical environm ental circles who regard anarcho-syndicalism with distrust, as they mistakenly identify it with industrialism. They argue that global industrialism has been responsible for centralized organization and environm ental destruction. They view industrialism as necessarily based upon mass production, and the factory as inevitably involving high energy use and dehum anizing working conditions. In short, critics believe that

providing six billion people with toilet p aper and building materials (let alone TVs, VCRs, and autom obiles) necessarily involves large-scale, mass production techniques ill-suited to ecological h ealth -regard less o f whether capiudist leeches or “free" workers are running the show. Industrialism, it is argu ed , is an environmental evil in and of itself; it is only m ade slightly m ore destructive by the narrow, short-term interests o f capital and state. Such critics argue that technology has likewise outgrow n its capitalistic origins, and has taken on a sinister and destructive life of its own.

I am not unsympathetic to this argum ent. T hat children and adults alike spend hours on end surrounded by deafening noise and blinding lights in video arcades, in an utterly synthetic technological orgy, is ample evidence of our species’ sick fetish for non-organic, superficial pleasures. The regim entation o f the work day, and the consignm ent of leisure and play to half-hour television slots interrupted by nauseating com m ercials, is nothing short of the industrial robotification of hum an n ature—an alarming process that has led many to argue that hum anity should abandon the industrial and technological revolutions altogether. They further argue that we should return to small-scale, minimally industrial technologies that utilize simple devices such as the hand loom. Given the enormously destructive effects of today’s industrial system, such a course may ultimately be the only path open to humanity. At this point, however, simply abandoning our cities and our technologies and hoping that our species will somehow return to a small-scale, preindustrial existence appears both unlikely and reckless.

Worker Control

In recent years, there has been a revolution in the distasteful discipline of “personnel” m anagem ent. For exam ple, “exp erts” are declaring a new day in industrial relations because bosses now eat in the same canteen as the workers in some industries. In the past, when the bosses seemed to be distant figures, the inequities of the class/wage system were obvious to all. But if the bosses exercise with the rank and file in the com pany gym, they are

36 Anarcho-Syndicalism, Technology, and Ecology


perceived as “really ju st som e of us.” In such circum stances, workers tend to forget the 10- or 20-to-one pay differential, com pany car, and handsom e retirem ent schem e that com es with being the boss. O ne exam ple of this new type of “personnel m an agem en t" is found in Australia, where there has been much fuss recently about a “harm onious, happy" outfit which “allows” em ployees to set their own wages, holiday arrangem ents, and production quotas. No w onder the boss is happy with this arran g em en t; s /h e no longer has to go to the trouble of working all this ou t for them . Letting the workers spend their time figuring ou t the fine details of their own wage slavery is touted as the pinnacle o f m odern m an agem ent techniques. (N ot only would the em ployees be m uch better off financially if they sacked the boss and shared all the profits am ong themselves, their work would b ecom e a richly hum an exp erien ce instead of a dehum anizing and unrew arding on e.) Merely by providing a semblance o f an egalitarian work envirom ent, m od em m anagem ent has dram atically increased production and minimized sabotage. Im agine the efficiency and satisfaction that would result if this ap p earan ce o f worker control were turned into a living reality.

Efficiency and Self-Sufficiency

A lthough the local, small-scale production of m anufactured items should be en cou raged in every ecological region, it would be absurd to exp ect that every village, town or region would p rod uce its own can openers, razor blades, nails, and windmill blades. Even if it were possible for craftspeople in every com m unity to p rod uce these products and thousands like them, this would surely involve an enorm ous waste of time and energy. No one wants to suffer the noise and clam or of the factory and be a slave to the m achine, but neither do most people want to m ake their own nails and rope by the m ethods traditionally em ployed by village blacksmiths and rope makers. The hellfire and brim stone o f the factory floor on the one hand, and hours o f tedious, m ind-num bing weaving on the other, are not desirable alternatives to the wire cu tter and the m echanical loom, respectively. T h ere is simply no good reason to reject industrial


workshops as a means for producing the wide variety o f m anufactured items diat are required in our daily lives.

Only certain regions have die ores necessary to the prod uction of iron, steel, copper and aluminum, and even if the m anufacture of the many items made from such ores were carried ou t in eac h local region, it would still require a transport network to get the ores there in the first place. In adopting the ecoregionally self- sufficient community as the basis for a future anarchist society, we must not blind ourselves to its real limitations. In the absence of intercommunal worker associations for the provision of transport, comm unication, and basic articles of consum ption, die an arch ist vision is reduced to an absurd and unworkable utopia. Although we may justly assert that many items such as bread, food, energy, building materials, ad infinitum should, and in many cases could, be produced by the inhabitants of each city-region, insisting upon a concept of total self-sufficiency, as anti-syndicalist anarchists are apt to do, is unrealistic and dogmadc.

No one wants to spend their whole life in the factory or workshop, but everyone needs nails, transportation, o r rop e at some time. It would only be fair that all people spend a few hours every week helping to provide these useful products in cooperation with their fellows. Machines do help us m ake these things more easily; people only becom e slaves to their m achines because they are slaves to their bosses and to a wasteful, growth- oriented economy. If there were no useless bosses who collect the profits but do no work at the machines they own or oversee, and if production did not always have to be increased to fuel an ever- expanding, growth-oriented consumerism, then it is doubtiul that any of us would have to work m ore than a few hours p er week. Those who are by tem peram ent “workaholics” could spend their time improving upon and experim enting with products or projects of their choice.

Primitivism and Technophilia

o o t in H f ? i. Sl°ne A 8 C 0r f°™ardfo T a OU ik ar teCf Ul° pia iS equally P ° inUess- Primitivism long

q ck fix from a (largely imagined) glorious past, while


technophiles long for the quick fix in an idealized future—when the way ou t of the present mess probably entails an imaginative m ixture o f Neolithic com m unity and selected technologies. For exam p le, the use of non-renewable oil and coal resources during the past two centuries is undoubtedly ill-suited to the ecology of ou r planet, but so would be the Neolithic firewood hearth , were it to be used by E a rth ’s six billion people today. (In time, all nonrenew able energy sources will of necessity be superseded by renew able ones such as wind and water.)

The Bio-Industrial Revolution

But retu rn in g to the present industrial/technological nightm are, it seem s evident that new technological priorities tend to p rod uce changes o f emphasis in the realm o f so-called pure science. Biology was, until quite recendy, seen as a "soft" science com p ared to the "hard" and m ore "logical" sciences of inorganic chem istry and physics. This is now changing, and the study of m olecular biology is at the forefront of contem porary intellectual and popular interest. Botany, biology, and biochemistry are em ergin g as the main sciences o f a second industrial age. Every day, natural products are being discovered that can take the place o f the outdated , chem ical synthetic materials o f bygone eras. A d o ctor in on e country discovers that a particular species o f coral m akes an excellen t m aterial for replacing lost or broken bone. A botanist in an o th er country discovers a nut which produces an oil that can be substituted for a wide variety of inorganic chemcials. In New South W ales, farm ers are experim enting with sorghum , ferm en tin g it to p rod uce ethanol—an environmentally clean car and tracto r fuel. T he sorghum and water by-products of this process are then used as high protein animal feed. Environm entally toxic paints containing lead or oil are being rep laced by relatively harmless and easily biodegradable water- based ones—which not only make the jo b of cleaning up m uch easier, but also point toward a future when environmentally inappropriate industrial products will be replaced by m ore benign ones. Perhaps we can envision a time when every item of industrial m anufacture presently associated with environm ental


destruction—cars, fuels, oils, aircraft, plastics, com p u ters, e tc .- i s constructed with materials that have been harmlessly extracted from nature, and which can in turn be harmlessly and quickly

reabsorbed by nature.

Capitalism and a Clean Environment

Industrialism is, however, beginning to partially reform itself. (O f course, environmental reforms under capitalism will su cceed only to the extent that they are com patible with the profit motive.) Even our capitalist bosses cannot escapc skin ca n ce r and oil slicks while they sun themselves at their exclusive beach resorts; and many people no longer wish to buy o r use environmentally unsound products. The capitalists, ever watchful of the market, have becom e increasingly aware of this fact; those companies which have presented a superficial “G reen im age” while persisting in unsound practices have on the whole been “found out,” and are beginning to regret their dishonesty. G reen journalism has created a better informed and extrem ely angry public which will no longer be easily fooled by transp aren t corporate tactics. Capitalists now fully appreciate that a G reen image with genuinely Green products behind it will translate into big dollars and huge profits in the future.

Capitalists are not the only segm ent of ou r population undergoing Green-inspired change. Everywhere in the world inventors, scientists, engineers, and botanochem ists are b ecom in g inspired by the vision of a greener world, and the n um ber o f new and potentially environmentally safe processes and products multiplies with every passing day.

The year 1993 heralded the mass production of starch-based plastic products, which are able to disintegrate within a couple of weeks if left outdoors. Starch-based golf tees, takeout food containers, and those irritating little ties on packaged loaves of

rea will be the Fust products to reach the m arketplace; the potential of starch-based plastics seems alm ost limitless.

xperiments with both old and new agricultural products arc also showing much promise. In the future, a little-known plant called Cranbe will almost certainly be used to produce a wide ran ge of


industrial oils and plastics that may serve as subsdtutes for many hazardous petrochem ically based products. T he world slump in cereal prices is leading many farm ers and com panies to consider grow ing long-discarded crops such and flax and hem p, the natural fibers of which could replace the chem ical foams used in chairs and m attresses. Rape seed oil is now being used as a base for glaziers’ putty and, like water-based paints, is destined to make h om e renovation a safer and m ore pleasant experience. In the m ore tropical areas of the U .S., elephant grass is being con sidered as an energy crop . In the South Pacific, palm oil may soon be used as a substitute for diesel (which in most places must be im ported at great exp ense) if certain m inor technicalides can be overcom e. U nderw ater windmills in the fast currents of New G u in ea’s T o rres Strait could provide com m ercially useful quantities o f electricity. L arge blocks of the m ore conventional types o f windmill are being considered for Australia’s wind swept Red C entre. T hese exam ples represent just a few of the many possibilities for replacing artificial or otherwise harmful raw m aterials used in industrial m anufacturing with natural or environm entally benign ones.

Consumerism and Environmentalism

Industrialism is not inherently anti-ecological, and the strength o f G reen consum erism will alm ost certainly ensure that the resou rce base for many o f the m anufactured products that we consum e m ust and will change for the better. But the individualistic mass con sum er culture which has grown up around the industrial system is an oth er m atter. If people continue to insist upon having three cars and individually owning every conceivable appliance and convenience, then things are unlikely to get very m uch better.

No environm entalist wishes to see many millions of acres of land devoted to the m onocultural production of maize or palm oil in o rd er to provide bio-fuels for our cars. But neither syndicalism n or, indeed, industrialism, require capitalism s prom otion o f “grow th” and individualistic over-consumption. For exam p le, syndicalists are com m itted to providing extensive public


transport networks and other basic utilities on a non-profit basis for the benefit of all; and the provision o f udlides o r public transport using m anufactured industrial products in no way requires the destructive and profit-oriented con su m er cu ltu re of the present day. It might take X num ber o f acres o f biom ass to power an electric railway, but it could well take 100 dm es that much to fuel the num ber of privately owned autom obiles which would transport a similar num ber of people as the train. It m ight take Y am ount of natural fiber to provide seating for that train, but it might take 100 times that much to outfit all o f those cars. While it might be possible to grow enough biomass or fiber on small lots in a large num ber of small, organically diverse farm s to support the train, the attempt to produce 100 times that am ou n t to support the cars almost inevitably implies the n eed for extensive monocultural production—with all the degrad ation of wilderness and soil that such farming m ethods entail.

Capitalists are comm itted to growth oriented consum erism ; it does not matter much to them w hether they are selling natural or ardficial products so long as people keep buying and consuming m ore and m ore. As a consequence, m ore and m ore of the available land is being given over to producing m ore and more products for individual consum ption. Syndicalists, on the other hand, understand the need for the communal consum ption of industrial resources. They understand that a w ell-constructed trolley line might last 100 years and transport millions o r even tens of millions of people in its lifetime. O nce a railway o r trolley line is built, there is no inherent requirem ent for grow th. Chances are, one line from point A to point B will be all that will ever be needed; there probably will be no need to con stru ct another, let alone 20 or 30 of them. The point is that syndicalists are not interested in growth or profit, and their co n cep t of industrialism must not be confused with the profoundly de- strucüve consum er culture of contem porary capitalism.

Anarcho-Syndicalism and Environmentalism

c o ? ! ^ WlllflC!! whether human technology and society can convolve successfully with nature. Neither the "primitivists" nor


the "technophiles" can read the future, but I am convinced that n eith er alone holds the answer. T hat we can simply dismantle the industrial and technological r/evolu d on s and return to small-scale tribal com m unities seems even m ore naive a proposal than som e old-fashioned anarcho-syndicalists' view that workers selfm an agem en t alone will bring about the "free society." T he idea that a w orkers’ paradise could simply be built upon the shoulders o f global capitalism is simply preposterous. The large-scale, centralized, m ass-producdon approach that developed with capitalism , idolized by many marxists, was, unfortunately, never seriously challenged by either the union m ovem ent or by anarcho-syndicalists. T he wider anarchist m ovem ent, however, has always distrusted large-scale, wasteful industrial pracUces and deplored the regim entation involved in work and the factory system, and has placed its faith in the self-governing, environmentally integrated com m unity. Anarcho-syndicalists should review the intellectual insights o f the broad anarchist m ovem ent to a m uch g reater exten t than they have. Otherwise anarcho- syndicalism will b ecom e ju st an oth er tired, 19th-century socialist philosophy with an overly optimistic assessment o f the liberatory potendal o f mass industrial culture.

Nevertheless, it is only through organizing ou r fellow wage- earn ers, who have the least to gain from the condnued functioning o f global capitalism, that we can build any lasting challenge to the state and its power elite. The tradidonal m ethods o f syndicalism, such as the general strike, could bring the global m egam achine to a com plete standstill overnight. No oth er group can achieve this because w age-earners, and especially the growing arm y o f service workers, rep resen t the majority (at least 60% ) of the adult population. O n ce the people wrest the industrial and service infrastructure from the hands of the elite, we can do what we will with it. Maybe the majority of workers will choose to dism antle their factories and abandon their fast-food restaurant chains, com m itting industrial mass m anufacture to the dustbin of history; or perhaps they will elect to develop new, m ore localized versions o f their industries. O f course, unless anarchists persuade their fellow workers to organize themselves to resist and eventually elim inate the cu rren t state and corp orate coercive apparatus, this whole discussion is so m uch pie in the sky. This is


die most compelling reason why an environm entally sensitive and rejuvenated anarcho-syndicalist m ovem en t rep resen ts o n e of the most practical m ethods of halting the destructive ad van ce o f the

state and the mega-corporation.The worldwide nature of pollution provides m o re reason for

international workers’ organizations. Even though go vern m en ts have achieved some successes in controlling polution , these successes have been sporadic and limited. F o r ex a m p le , the Montreal protocol appears to have been successful in slowing the continued production of ozone-depleting chloi o flu o io cai bons, 01 CFCs. These chemicals are, however, mainly p ro d u ced by only six companies, and we should not be too optimistic ab ou t the possibility for global cooperation between capitalists an d national governments on environmental issues. (1 he failure to d o anything about “greenhouse” gas emissions shows the near-total lack o f environmental concern of those in power.) A lthough CFC s were first synthesized in 1894, they were not used industrially until 1927. Had they been used beginning in 1894 , we may n ot have had an ozone layer left to protect. We are told that, after a period of thinning, the ozone layer will most likely begin to rep air itself. But what other longterm or irreversible industrial d a m a g e is occurring without our being aware of it?

The industrial system as we know it may indeed be causing such damage, but what do anti-syndicalist anarchists p ro p o se to do about it? Even if humanity decided to give up industrialism altogether and return to a craft econom y, global co o p era tio n am ong the industrial workers of the world would be necessary to implement that decision— via a perm anent, worldwide gen eral strike. In the absence of a grassroots and anarchistically inspired workers movement that could m ount a sustained opposition to industrial capitalism, such a course does not even p resen t itself as a possibility. Anti-syndicalist anarchists, if they are sin cere in their desire to abolish the industrial system, should as a m atter o f logic talk with working people, persuade them to accep t their p o in t of view, and then help organize them to im plem ent it. N eith er capita ists nor unorganized, unaware workers will ab an d o n their actones and consumerist habits. And as long as th ere are

in ustnal capitalists— and no massive international opposition to them industrialism as we know it will assuredly rem ain .


Means and Ends

It is true that we may ultimately discover that m ost technology, and even the industrial system itself, is inherently environm entally destructive. It is even possible that m any o f the new eco- tech n ologies that seem to offer hope may turn ou t to have u n foreseen side effects, and that hum anity will be com pelled to give up m o d e rn technology altogether. But if this happens, it m ust be an o rgan ic process. Its starting point, one would hope, would n o t be simply to smash up the m achines, dynamite the roads, an d ab an d o n the cities, beginning again at “year zero ”—as Pol P o t a ttem p ted to do in Cam bodia. T h e only non-authoritarian way in which the “year z e ro ” can co m e is for the people to decide unanim ously to destroy their factories, stores, highways, and te lep h o n e systems themselves. If this happens, there would be n o th in g anyone could o r should do to stop them. But starvation, dislocation, chaos, and violence would almost certainly be the im m ed iate result o f such reckless actions, leading to dictatorship, h o rre n d o u s suffering, and political and social passivity in the long run. (A nd even if primitivists would, by som e m iracle, convince a m ajority o f o u r fellow citizens to discard science and technology, would that give them the right to force the rest o f us to submit to their will?)

T h e everyday needs o f hum anity are enm eshed in the co n tin u ed fu n ction in g o f the industrial m achine. O ne can n ot simply sm ash up the life-support system and hope for the best. Instead, it m ust be carefully dismantled while new m ethods and practices are developed. If we are to achieve an eco-anarchist society, w orkers m ust wrest power from their employers, after which the goal should be production o f socially necessary and environm entally benign goods. O n ce people are no longer forced to p ro d u ce useless co n su m er goods and services, it is likely that every p erson will work only a very few hours per week—leaving p eop le with m u ch m o re time to devote to their own interests and to their com m u n ities. By elim inating the parasitic classes and red u cin g industrial activity to the production o f basic necessities, a h u g e a m o u n t o f h u m an energy would be released. The reco n stru ctio n o f the eco-regionally integrated hum an com m unity


from the corpse of the state could thus co m m en ce in an increm ental way, ensuring that basic hum an needs would be effectively met while retaining the positive aspects o f the industrial infrastructure. Each of us would have to con tin u e to work a few hours per week to keep the industrial m ach in e minimally functioning while we made changes.

If, in the face of sustained efforts to reduce its adverse effects and to integrate it with the local eco-region, the industrial system still proved to be an environmental m enace, then hum anity would, one hopes, have had the time to exp lore new ways o f life suited to meeting its basic needs without industry as we know it. Industrial syndicalism is one relatively bloodless way o f doin g away with the state/capitalist elite and of allowing construction o f an anarchist society; it may or may not have a place in the creation of an ecologically sound way of life, but it is a sure m eth od of returning econom ic and industrial power into the hands o f the people. Anarchists—be they industrial-syndicalist, tech n oph ile, or neo-primitivist— thus have no program oth er than to bluntly declare that it is the people who must decide their own social and environmental destiny.

Of course, the question remains of whether industrial syndicalism is the only, or most satisfactory, anarchist m ethod of reorganizing the distribution of goods and services within communities. What we can be sure of is that the individualistic mass consumerism of the current state/capitalist system is quite ill-suited to the health and sustainability of life on E arth .

The Organization of Daily Life

In order to have influence, anarchists, who have always believed that the individual and the collectivity are of equal value and can coexist harmoniously, must clarify the alternatives to both capitalist and authoritarian “communist" econom ics. For exam p le, nonprofit, community-based forms of individual skills exch an g e, sue as barter based networks, represent cooperative efforts which strengthen the autonomy of both individuals and com m unities.

^ ‘ S exchanSe systems use their own bartered "currency" istri ute goods, services, and labor within the com m unity;


com m unity infrastructures can thus develop according to the ideals of their m em bers, without d epen d en ce upon governm ent, capital, o r state.

T he value that ordinary people place upon individual effort and exch an g e can n o t be ignored by anarchists; there is simply no need to collectivize or industrialize those services that do not require elab orate structures. Further, the rise of the service sector (counseling, food services, daycare, e tc .) , together with the need to red u ce the work week and to minimize consum ption by prod ucing only socially necessary goods, will m ean that the social organization o f work will be increasingly directed toward com m unity-based and non-profit activities such as skills exchange networks.

But unless the trains run and municipal water and energy supplies are assured, the social situation will quickly dissolve into chaos. T h e intercom m u n al postal and transport networks needed to deliver basic goods and services obviously cannot be supplied by com m unity-based skills exch an ge networks. Again, anarcho- syndicalists’ traditional approach to providing such services via w orker-controlled organizations points to a solution: workers in non-profit industries would simply exchange their labor and products for credits in local skills exch ange networks. Small-scale, non-industrial ap proaches and their integradon with local exch an g e networks are thus viable steps toward an anarchist society. T h e realization of a federauon of free com m uniues requires a m ulti-faceted attack upon the insutudons o f capital and state, involving elem ents o f traditional syndicalism as well as m ore individually orien ted yet essentially non-capitalist systems of prod uction and consum ption, systems that allow for adequate levels o f con su m er choice.

Village life is in decline everywhere and, even if it will eventually be necessary to return to a world com posed of small villages, at p resen t we face the problem of increasing millions of urban dwellers living on the outskirts of ciues which long ago ceased to be discernible social entities. The social ills upon which m od ern life is based—mass alienation, consum erism , and self- cen tered individualism—may prove fatal to our species, and should be dem ocratically eradicated through education. Syndicalism, local skills exch ange networks, and traditional

cooperative ventures are ways of helping people to educate themselves about community and regionally based ways o f life. These possibilities are for superior to either the Stalinist "proletarianization" of the people through terro r, o r the state capitalist robotification of the urban and rural masses by an endless media circus that lobotomizes people into insatiable consumerism, cynicism, and social apathy.


Anarchism, Ecology, and Human Population

T h e idea that the dram atic increase in hum an population is the prim ary cause of environm ental degradation has becom e increasingly popular in the media. Media pundits and some “environm entalists” tell us that the most dangerous threat to planetary survival is, simply, "too many people." Thus, the right- wing, m echanistic, pseudo-scientific beliefs of some 19th-century social theorists—m ost notably Malthus—are regaining currency, even in certain environm ental circles.

Frequently, off-the-cuff rem arks by environmentalists about population or im m igration are seized upon by the press and quoted ou t o f co n tex t as evidence o f Green racism or fascism. But such rem arks often do reveal truly reactionary atdtudes. For exam p le, m any people in the (non-radical but G reen-oriented) Australian conservation lobby wish to halt all im migration on the "environm ental" grounds that the country is already over- populated. Such attitudes can only do great dam age to the radical G reen m ovem ent. Similarly, som e argue that human populations, like som e o th e r anim al populations, must follow "boom and bust" cycles as do locusts or caterpillars. Third World starvation, land d egrad ation , and pollution, rather than being the result of capitalism and anti-ecological lifestyles, are, we are told, merely the result o f natural population pressures.

This cru d e linking o f elem entary population biology with grossly reductionistic, politically biased sociological analysis must be challenged, since it is a dangerous ideology with fascist overtones. H um ans are reflective social beings who have the power to self-regulate their num bers and their social systems; locusts do n ot have this ability. And no intelligent person today would deny that overpopulation problems am ong some non-white

50 Anarchism, Ecology, and Human Population

croups arc die result of socioeconom ic oppression, n ot genes. One need only look at the modest level o f one to two million at which the Australian aboriginal population has rem ain ed for the past 40 000 years to realize that hum an populations are indeed capable of attaining and sustaining optim al, but not necessarily

maximal, sizes.Before the development of capitalism, natural ab un d an ce was

the pervasive feature of most regions in the woi Id. T h e A m erican prairies were home to hundreds of millions of buffalo, and the grasslands of Africa hosted a multitude of large anim als. The Murray River in Australia was awash with gigantic M urray cod , and American rivers were likewise filled with salm on. It rem ains true that, treated with care and respcct, the E arth is capable of supporting enormous populations of large and small anim als; likewise, the existence of 5, 10, or even 15 billion p eople— although an undesirably large hum an population—does not in itself imply the degradation of nature.

The problem lies not so much with the num ber o f people but with the anti-ecological lifestyles fostered by the capitalist economic system. For example, human population pressure has undoubtedly had some effect upon the decline o f African elephants, since they need a lot of space and conflict with agriculture. The virtual elimination of 10 million elephants by the end of the 1980s, however, resulted m ore from avaricious ivory trading than peaceful human settlem ent and expansion. Drift netting, cattle ranching, river pollution, and industrial logging are other practices that deplete species numbers.

In a sense, there is not so much a population problem as a consumption problem. The postwar years have seen an explosion of individual acquisitiveness—everyone must own two cars, a color TV, a VCR, a washing machine, and a virtually lifeless lawn—in stark disregard for the collective effect of such items upon society and nature. A sharing of domestic resources, a little thought, and community energy is all that would be required to overturn this

angerous cult of consumerism. Rather than each family or in mdual building a castle, families and individuals could, toget er, construct the self-sufficient city. Rather than laboring to achieve individual consum er success, we could work for the provision of basic public goods and services for all.


Food is the m ost basic necessity o f life, and dem ocratically con trolled food production should on ce again becom e a focus of ou r daily lives. People from both town and country must learn to give up lawns and m onocultural, pesticide-driven agribusinesses, replacing them with aesthetically pleasing organic gardens and farms. T he hugely degraded and treeless soils o f wheat belts and range lands await regeneration by the careful, diligent work of rural peoples; even ou r urban nature strips and parks could provide a feast for ourselves and oth er species. Through "edible landscaping" in every available nook and cranny o f our topography, we could ensure the availability o f healthy foods for all people—and increase the base upon which natural abundance may o n ce again flourish.

T h e idea that h u n ger is caused by scarcity due to overpopulation is simply a lie. In their pioneering and meticulously research ed study o f world h unger entitled Food First, Frances M oore L app e and Josep h Collins succinctly state the truth regarding the world availability of food:

Measured globally, there is enough food for everyone now. The world is producing each day two pounds of grain—more than 3,000 calories and ample protein—for every man, woman and child on Earth. This 3,000-calorie estimate, more than that consumed by the Western European, does not include the many other nutritious foods people eat—beans, nuts, fruits, vegetables, root crops, and grass-fed meat. Thus, on a global scale, the idea that there is not enough food to go around simply does not hold up.1

Even this statistic does not fully explain the true state of affairs regarding the realtionship between land and world hunger. The stark fact is that the people who own and control most of the arable land ch oose not to cultivate it:

In most countries where people are hungry, large landholders control most of the land. A study of 83 countries showed that 3% of all landholders control a staggering 79% of all farmland. . . . Many who hold large amounts of land do so for prestige or as an investment, not as a source of food, and leave a considerable acreage unplanted. Moreover, the wealth produced is invariably not reinvested for rural development but drained off foi

52 Anarchism. Ecology, and Human Population

conspicuous consumption and for investment in industries catering to the fancies of urban and foreign well-to-do. . . . In both Africa and South America less than 20% of the potential arable land is

cultivated.'2

Instead of being cultivated, m uch o f this land is left as perm anent pasture for livestock. Those areas which are cultivated (usually the most fertile and easily irrigated) are invariably not used to grow staples for local use, such as ricc oi millet, but rather arc used to grow cash crops such as tob acco oi co co a , or to producc low nutrition and luxury crops asparagus, cu cu m b ers, strawberries, tomatoes, pineapples, or flowers—for affluent hom es and overseas markets. W here “staples” are p rod u ced , these are most often grown not to feed local people but to feed cattle in order to provide beef for the rich. Cassava, for exam p le, which used to be considered a basic bulk food for the p oor, is now being exported by the shipload to feed European cattle.

Gross inequalities in land ownership and distribution resulting from colonialism have not only signalled the end o f an cien t horticultural systems and traditional village coop eration , but have also created a situation in which the laborers who work the land have no incentive to improve it. For exam ple, before the British arrived in what is now called Bangladesh, cooperative embankment, and pond and irrigation channel con stru ction , ensured the retention of monsoon waters. This perm itted the planting of an extra crop each year, and provided a plentiful supply of fresh fish for the people:

At present, most of the fishing waters are controlled by absentee owners who are satisfied to sell a small quantity of fish at high pnees to a few well-off consumers. . . . But what incentives are there for sharecroppers and laborers, who work 90% of the land, to build and maintain draining and irrigation canals and embankments when such investments would primarily benefit the an owners. . . . Not surprisingly, only about 5% of the country’s cu treated land is irrigated. Simple irrigation, making the “dry season no longer dry, would amount to a doubling of the food

’ ^ °°P eidtion in digging and maintaining ponds was common before 1793 when the British instituted the individual

° f land- I o d i *y in villages throughout Bangladesh we


sadly note many silted-up ponds, and canals hardly capable of holding much water. And they are no longer village ponds but private ponds. Village-wide cooperative work is impossible when less than 10% of the rural households own 51% of the cultivated land, and when almost half the families are deprived of land. . . In Bangladesh, as in many countries we are made to perceive as hopelessly poor, it is the extreme inequality of the control over productive resources that makes cooperative work difficult and thwarts production.1'

T he unequal distribution of land not only leads to the underutilization o f arable land, but places extra strain upon fragile ecosystem s by forcing landless people to attem pt to farm unsuitable areas. Televised images o f starving peasants standing beside erod ed hillsides or overgrazed marginal lands do not rep resen t local ign oran ce, but rather the misappropriation of prim e agricultural lands by moneyed elites and transnational corp oration s. This has certainly been the case in the Amazon, w here the governm ent has sponsored rainforest destruction by peasant “p ion eers” in o rd er to avoid having to forcibly redistribute B razil’s bountiful agricultural land. In other parts of the world, the colonial carving-up of nom adic lands, taxes upon cattle (which led to the destruction of the barter econom y and forced h erd ers to p rod uce m ore for sale), and the post-colonial fetishization o f b eef products by the rich (instead of the p roduction o f m ixed herds of different and smaller animals, utilizing a variety o f forage) have all led to the enforced ab an d on m en t of traditional and environmentally sensitive m ethods o f anim al husbandry.

T h e overriding cause of hunger, starvation, and environmental d egradation , th en —indeed, lurking behind the obvious lifestyle and technology factors—is the corporate capitalist system under which we are forced to live. Forty thousand children die each day from m alnutrition, while peasants and tribal peoples are forced off their traditional lands by corporations anxious to grow profitable exp o rt crops such as tobacco, sugar cane, and coffee. T he advance o f corp orate capitalism is unrelenting. For exam ple, the "free trade" agreem ent between M exico, Canada, and the U nited Suites provides a framework for the destruction of the ejiclos (peasant cooperative village holdings) by corporate interests,


and threatens to completely reverse the gains m ade by ruralpeoples in the Mexican Revolution.

Of course, not only do corp orate capitalist industrial andagricultural methods degrade the land, they also fuel population growth. There is a proven correlation between e x trem e poverty and dramatic increases in population. W hen the English Commons began to be fenced in the 17th century, household poverty levels began to shoot up, followed by an in ciease in population. As Britain began to exploit the resources o f its new colonies, however, revolution was postponed by a com p en satin g rise in the living standards of its citizenry. T he con tin u ed theft and destruction of land by European, A m erican and, later, Japanese state and corporate bureaucracies led to extrem e poverty in many parts of Africa, Latin A m erica, India, and Southeast Asia. Although the population has now stabilized in most parts of Europe and the U.S., the lack of sufficient incom e, food, and health care in many of their form er colon ics is the single largest contributing factor to the startling increases in world population. When access to health services and adequate nutrition is low, infant and child mortality is high, and women tend to have as many children as possible so that at least som e of them will survive. It has been dem onstrated conclusively that m ost mothers, if convinced that health services, food, and security will be provided such that every child will have a very good ch an ce of reaching maturity, prefer to restrict themselves to few, even one or two, children. By overthrowing corporate capitalism and returning land to the people, the population problem will be all but eliminated in those countries where hunger, misery, and death now reign supreme.

Although the attempt to link hum an sexual politics withenvironmental issues is sometimes misguided, it is obvious thatsexual politics are necessarily an im portant co m p o n en t o f thepopulation problem. Recent evidence shows that, in addition toa continuing decrease in desired optimal family size since theindustrial revolution (undoubtedly tied to decreasing infantmorality rates and an upswing in living standards), a desire forema e emancipation that actually preceded industrialization was•v? v> ̂ cr‘l'ca* factor in the decline of European birth rates in the 18th and 19th centuries:


If industrialization and declining mortality were not completely responsible for declining fertility, then what else was? Increasingly the evidence points to another, initially independent revolution— the emancipation of women. The origins of this profound and continuing social movement probably can be found in the eighteenth century Enlightenment. Many of the leading voices of the Enlightenment were French, and although women were not central to their concerns, these thinkers legitimized the questioning of social and political roles, including those associated with patriarchy. The Enlightenment also fostered a sense of hope that through knowledge, the old world of predestination and fatalism would be replaced by one of freedom to shape human destiny for the better.4

Today, the “m edicalization” of birth control—which denies basic hum an rights to w om en—is greatly contributing to frightening increases in hum an population. Birth control has been practiced in som e form in virtually all societies, and is primarily an individual an d social, n ot a m edical, practice—that is, doctors and b ureaucracies n eed n ot be involved. The use of condom s, diaphragm s, an d o th er form s of birth control involve the technical issues o f how to produce and distribute them, the social issue o f how best to get people to use them, and the individual issue o f personal ch oice . T hese are not medical issues.

T o m axim ize its effectiveness, contraception should be available in every m arketplace, store, and superm arket, in every village, town, and city o f the world, so that anyone, at any age, has unrestricted access to the contraceptive of h er/h is choice. A n oth er key to low ering the birth rate is that such unrestricted access to contraceptives must coincide with a decline in p atriarchal attitudes and an increase in willingness on the part of m en to voluntarily utilize birth control (and to support its use by their p artn ers).

T he m edicalization o f reproduction has led not only to restricted access to con tracep tion , but also to a kind of "soft (and som etim es ‘h a rd ’ ) policing" o f reproductive technologies by m edical b ureaucrats and state social workers. This has never actually con trolled population growth over the long term, and has frequently led to sickening acts of cruelty. Authoritarian state sterilization p rogram s such as C hina’s one-child-per-family policy


have met with limited localized success (especially in the countryside), but at the expense of individual health and ch oice (see PBS show, "China’s Only Child"). In the Philippines, the governm ent offers poverty-stricken women, starving for want o f a d ecen t meal, comparatively large amounts of cash to u nd ergo sterilization. These operations are frequently perform ed in rural areas under extremely unsanitary conditions, with little ot no aftercare , and have led to the deaths of large num bers o f wom en who have undergone this humiliadng experience. Finally, it has been shown that in many places in the Third World the husband’s refusal to forego sexual intercourse or allow the use o f birth con tro l (oiten because of religious proscriptions) is the biggest obstacle to limiting pregnancies—an obstacle cited by women themselves.

Attempts to look at the population problem from a purely biological or "scientific" perspective, without careful analysis of class, race and gender structures, are at best naive and at worst positively dangerous. To blame an abstract biological notion of natural increase for overpopulating the world—when it is quite obviously caused by statism, patriarchy, and capitalism —suggests that a starving Somali refugee is as m uch to blam e for overpopulation as a fat businessman or grossly overpaid W orld Bank official. Humanity must choose to develop the alternative lifestyles, social systems, and sexual practices that will lead to stable and sustainable population levels. But under the present system, such change is impossible to achieve without top-down, authoritarian methods, and use of such m ethods is no gu aran tee of success. Only freedom from hunger and ill health, plus the freedom of educated reproductive choice, can achieve the ecological integration of humanity with the rest of n atu re. Only a revolution in the econom ic, social, and agrarian realm s, in concert with women’s liberation from exploitative patriarchal and capitalist practices, can solve the present hum an population crisis.

1. p. 21.2. Food First, pp. 21-223. Food First, pp. 26-28

Fertility m Transition,” by Jam es L. Newinan, Focus, Spring 1986,pp. 4-5

Anarchism 8c Social Ecology: A Critique o f Murray Bookchin

M u r r a y Bookchin has deservedly em erged as a m ajor thinker and w riter in the late 20th century; and he is widely respected as one o f the m ost im portan t anarchist theoreticians of our time. His ideas ab out the relationship between social ecology, anarchism , and trade unions thus m erit our close attention.

A lthough B ookchin has b ecom e openly hostile toward unionism and anarcho-syndicalism —and in fact to any class-based analysis—this has not always been the case. Some of his earlier writings on these subjects, though deeply critical of syndicalism, con tain ed insightful com m ents upon the value of traditional an archo-revolutionary theory and practice. The best exam ple of his earlier thinking is found in his essay, "Self-Management and the New T echn ology ," published in 1980. Here Bookchin argues that the syndicalist con ception of the central role of factory or workplace in a future anarchist society reflects an overestimation of the libcratory potential o f large-scale industrial activity. He rightly claim s that the factory system has destroyed the craftsman and the artisan, and has degraded the dignity of work, through its reliance on mass production:

Of the technical changes that separate our own era frorn the past ones, no single device was more important than that of the least mechanical of all-the factory. Neither Watt’s steam engine nor Bessemer’s furnace was more significant than the simple process of rationalizing labor into an industrial engine for the production of commodities. Machinery, in the conventional sense of the term, heightened this process vastly—but the systemic rationalization of labor to serve in ever-more-specialized tasks demolished the technical structure of self-managed societies and ultimately of workmanship-the "selfhood" of the economic realm.

58 Anarchism & Social Ecology: A critique o f Murray Bookchin

True craftsmanship is loving work, not onerous toil. It arouses the senses, not dulls them. It adds dignity to humanity, not demeans it. It gives free range to the spirit, not aboits it. Within the technical sphere it is the expression of selfhood par excellence—of individuation, consciousness, and freedom. These words dance throughout every account of well-crafted objects and artistic works.

The factory worker lives merely 011 the memory of such traits. The din of the factory drowns out every thought, not to speak of any song; the division of labor denies the worker any relationship to the community; the rationalization of labor dulls his or her senses and exhausts his or her body. There is no room whatever for any of the artisan’s modes of expression—from artistry to spirituality—other than an interaction with objects that reduce the worker to a mere object. . . . Marxism and syndicalism alike, by virtue of their commitment to the factory as a revolutionary social arena, must recast self-management to mean the industrial management of the self. . . . Both ideologies share the notion that the factory is the "school" of revolution, and in the case of syndicalism, of social reconstruction, rather than its undoing. [Both] share a common commitment to the factory’s structural role as a source of social mobilization. . . . The factory not only serves to mobilize and train the proletariat but to dehumanize it. Freedom is to be found not within the factory but outside it.1

Bookchin concludes that the factory system, the foundation of industrial syndicalism, is intrinsically authoritarian and d eh u m an izing. The syndicalists, he feels, have confused the factory, the realm of econom ic necessity," with the "realm o f social freedom ,"

or community, and the liberated city. Contrary to the syndicalist vision, the factory should never be regarded as the locus of political action and freedom . In Bookchin’s view, only the re-em ergence of a nonhierarchical and econom ically ju st social existence will guarantee liberty and prosperity. He further argues tiiat the coal-steel-oil technology upon which the factory system is based is no longer viable due to resource depletion.

Bookchin contends that solar, wind, and o th er renewable energy sources are most efficiently utilized on a local basis. An economic infrastructure consisting of a large num ber of small wor s ops, producing individually crafted tools from local, non-polluting power sources, would replace the industrial


m anufacturing system o f the past. The factory is obsolete; it no longer belongs even to the realm of necessity—environm ental determ in ants having ren d ered the factory system of industrial p roduction ecologically, and thus econom ically, redundant.

Bookchin m akes som e valid points in this penetrating essay. For exam p le, the pictures o f thousands of workers—heads held high and an arch ist banners in hand, m arching out of row upon row of factories—that have until recently adorned our anarcho-syndicalist jou rn als, exhibit a singular inability to appreciate the scope of both the ecological crisis and the em erging, global ecological consciousness. T he reasons for this im portant oversight are historical and practical, not theoretical. At the end of the 19th century, a cen tu ry that witnessed rapid industrial development, m arxists and socialists regarded the eco-anarchist ideal of ecoregion al self-sufficiency and tow n/country balance as too utopian or, alternately, as indicative of a backward-looking, pre-industrial ideology. In turn, anarchists saw fit to downplay the environm ental aspects o f their vision, and anarcho-syndicalists con tin u ed to focus upon establishing industrial dem ocracy inside the factory, to som e exten t ignoring the wider ecological com p on en ts o f the anarchist tradition. Unlike marxists, however, anarchists have always shown interest in the proper relationship between industry and ecology—an early and famous exam ple being K ropotkin's Fields, Factories and Workshops. Given our current ecological crisis, Bookchin is quite correct in stressing the im p ortan ce o f restorin g anarchist theory’s focus upon appropriate technologies and ecologically integrated communities.

B o o k ch in ’s essay was, however, written over a decade ago and, with the o th er essays in Towards an Ecological Society, it bridges the two phases o f his writing and thinking: Bookchin theA narchist-Ecologist o f the 1960s and ’70s, and Bookchin the Social E cologist o f the 1980s and ’90s. (Notably, Bookchin the Social Ecologist is far less kind to anarchism and unionism than he could b e.) His two pam phlets, Ecology and Revolutionary I bought and Towards a I.iberatory Technology (both written in 1965 and rep rinted in an anthology o f his writings entitled Post-Scarcity Anarchism), are su ccin ct and easily understandable statements of the ecological-anarchist viewpoint. In these early pamphlets as well as in his two later books ( The Limits o f the City, 1974, and

60 Anarchism & Social Ecology: A critique of Murray Bookchin

Toward an Ecological Society, 1980 ), Bookchin updated and en larged upon many social-ecological ideas found in the works of past utopian and anarchist thinkers-notably Charles Fourier, Peter Kropotkin, and Elisee Reclus. He clearly and convincingly showed that, with its non-centrist and non-hierarchical p rescription for a stateless order, anarchism is the only social philosophy capable of ensuring the long-term survival o f our

species and our planet.Since the end of the 1970s Bookchin has been exp ou n d in g his

ecological philosophy, "social ecology. Although n one of the basic tenets of Bookchin’s social ecology are incom patible with anarchism, in his m ore recent works he m entions anarchy only in passing. Nevertheless, many things that Bookchin has to say are relevant to anarchists. This is especially true o f his exten d ed discussions of the role of patriarchy in creating a hierarchical, exploitative and anti-ecological social system—an issue that was underplayed by Peter Kropotkin and Em m a Goldm an in their analyses of the evolution of hum an authoritarian structures.

Bookchin’s explicit rejection of the need for working class organization and trade unionism, however, signifies a widening philosophical gap between social ecology and the d om in an t trends in m odem anarchism. Indeed, Bookchin seems to reject any form of class analysis. In the most accessible of his recen t works, The Modem Crisis, he mercilessly attacks an arch o- syndicalism, the IWW, and unionism. Because its prop onen ts insist upon class analysis and believe in the revolutionary importance of the industrial proletariat (even though m odern anarcho-syndicalists consider almost all productive persons— from housewives, to service workers, to factory workers— as part o f the proletariat ) anarchism, like marxism, seems to B ookchin ju st

another tired, old, irrelevant socialist philosophy:

The politics we must pursue is grassroots, fertilized by the ecological, feminist, communitarian and anti-war movements that have patently displaced the traditional workers’ movement of half a century ago. Heie the so called revolutionary ideologies of our era—socialism and anarchism-fall upon hard times. Besides, their constituency" is literally being "phased out." The factory in its

tra lUonal form is gradually becoming an archaism. Robots will soon replace the assembly line as the agents of mass industrial


production. Hence future generations of industrial proletarians may be a marginal stratum marking the end of American industrial society.

The new "classless class" we now deduce is united more by cultural ties than by economic ones: ethnics, women,countercultural people, environmentalists, the aged, unemployables 01 unemployed, the "ghetto" people, etc. It is this "counter-culture" in the broadest sense of the term, with its battery of alternative organizations, technologies, periodicals, food co-operatives, health and women’s centers, that seems to offer common resistance to Caesarism and corporatism. The re- emergence of "the people" in contrast to the steady decline of "the proletariat" verifies the ascendancy of community over factory, of town and neighborhood over assembly line. The hand fits the glove perfectly—and clenched it makes the real fist of our time.2

Exactly what sense are we to make of such sweeping dismissals o f several cen tu ries o f sustained resistance to the encroachm ents of capital and state by ordinary working people? Anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists have, to my knowledge, always emphasised the n eed to foster com m unity, and have never made the absurd claim that society could be "organized from the factory floor." It is simply w rong for B ookchin to claim that anarcho-syndicalism (let alone anarchism as a whole) has emphasized the historical destiny o f the industrial proletariat at the expense of community and free city life. Anarchists have always emphasized that the prim ary unit o f an arch ist society should be the free, ecologically integrated city o r town—how else could one hope to organize social life in the absence o f the nation state? And just why w ouldn’t unions and w orkers’ cooperatives—be they comprised of bakers, g rocers, bus drivers, postal workers or daycare workers—be the natural, logical bodies within which ordinary working people would coord in ate the econ om ic and industrial life of their city? M em bers and potential m em bers of trade unions and industrial unions are not ju st "the proletariat"; they are, rather, real people— feminists, p eace activists and ecologists included. They join tog eth er to organize their trade or service in a spirit of equality, p eace and coop eration .

Observing today’s decline in m anufacturing and heavy industry in his own country, Bookchin fails to appreciate the well-known


fact that capitalist m anufacturers have moved offshore. Rather than give in to workers’ dem ands for higher pay and better conditions, capitalists in Am erica and Australia have chosen to move their industrial plants into “newly industrializing” countries in Laun America, Southeast Asia, and elsewhere. In som e o f these countries, the state/capitalist push to industrialize has led to the mass exploitation of labor at near starvation wages, and the appalling abuse of female and child labor. T he A m erican union movement, long ago usurped by conservative elem ents (with the active aid of the governm ent), has done very little— both in the U.S. and abroad— to com bat these trends, and m ost A m ericans rightly perceive it as ineffective and outdated. M eanwhile, workplace organizers in Indonesia and Latin A m erica regularly “disappear” or receive long prison sentences. Millions o f people, including children, slave in sweat shops in these “newly industrializing countries,” and, in doing so, u nderm ine the wages and conditions in the “industrialized world.” Capitalists insist that labor costs are too high at hom e, and call for working people to accept lowered wages and degraded working conditions in o rd er to retain jobs and to com pete with offshore enterprises. Virtual slave labor overseas is thus being used to m anipulate w orkers and undermine the effectiveness of unions at hom e, while fledgling union movements in developing countries are ruthlessly suppressed.

Near instantaneous satellite com m unication and accou n tin g technologies have allowed the industrialists to m ove their operations into the m ore stable areas of the T hird W orld; increased transport costs are handsomely com pensated for by negligible labor costs. Because anti-syndicalist anarchists fail to look beyond their own shores, they lack an appreciation o f this global capitalist strategy designed to destroy working class organization. The industrial working class is indeed declining at

ome, but the mass proletarianization of, for exam ple, the rural vi agers of Northern Thailand, who are moving south to work in the new factories, is increasing. Meanwhile, world population continues to increase, and nearly everyone wants a TV and a car, while everyone needs can openers, clothes, cooking utensils, and

er necessities. Because it is the working class who produce uc items, it follows that, even given the trend toward


autom ation , worldwide the industrial working class is increasing, not decreasing. T h e virtual outlawing of unionism in Indonesia should provide anti-syndicalist anarchists with ample evidence of the fact that the capitalist state will go to almost any lengths to prevent w orker organization.

D evelopm ents within the service sector are also foolishly overlooked by Bookchin and o th er critics of industrial unionism. H am bu rger slingers and superm arket personnel may not be industrial workers in the traditional sense, but they are certainly exploited workers. As job s in m anufacturing and heavy industry move offshore, large num bers o f adult women (and increasing num bers o f displaced adult male workers) are joining 14-to-17- year-old youths in job s in the light industrial, clerical, and service sectors. U nfortunately, the adults are too desperate, and the teenagers too naive, to be easily organized. As new or existing unions begin to seriously undertake the task of listening to and organizing these workers, encouragin g trends are em erging in the service secto r that certainly should not be overlooked by anarchists.

So, althou gh , thankfully, millions of people are no longer forced to claw at rocks with crude picks in the bowels of the Earth in o rd e r to m ake a living, I fail to see why Bookchin is confident that the worker is obsolete. If work itself is obsolete, how are the m ajority o f ou r population—people who are not managers or w ell-educated professionals—going to support their families? How is anyone going to travel or phone another city in B ook ch in ’s ideal world of liberated, self-sufficient city-communes unless we can con stru ct, install, and repair the roads, railways and telephone cables? People will always want to send letters and packages to each oth er, and thus a postal service will always be necessary (an d , if we ever colonize other planets, even m ore n ecessary!). E co n o m ic and industrial life are unmistakably global in n atu re; the idea that one could organize an intercontinental railway netw ork from one com m un e or city alone is as absurd as the proposition that one could organize social life from the factory floor.

Industrial and service sector work is hardly likely to disappear, indeed, 60% o f the U nited States adult population does such work. A narchists simply state, realistically, that, in the absence of


capitalism and the nation suite, m ost w orkers will organize (or continue to organize) to control the work th at they choose to p erform -for the good of themselves, th eir city, their ecological region, and humanity. Most anarcho-syndicalists do not have tunnel vision; anarcho-syndicalism is a hum anistic clu ster o f ideas that embraces decentralized self-governm ent in all aspects of human social life -th e free city, the agricultural coop erative, the household, the hobby group, and the w orkplace.

Bookchin is m ore constructive when he points to "the Green network" as providing a new and significant springboard to revolutionary transformation. Over the past 30 years, individuals and groups of people connected by nothing o th er than a love of the Earth have begun putting their philosophies into action. Local groups of horticulturalists growing native trees for free distribution, organic food cooperatives, forest action groups, and a plethora of specialized ecological journals, have been bringing together people of all races, classes, and ages. T he local, popular, and decentralized nature of this G reen netw orking rep resen ts a powerful and non-centralized force for social and ecological change. At the m ore radical end of the G reen network on e finds people who care deeply about the environm ent, but who have become disillusioned about the ability of the state /cap italist order to solve the urgent ecological problems of the day. This group has set out to save the planet by any reasonable m eans—legal or otherwise. They have flung themselves in front o f bulldozers, whaling ships, and logging trucks. T heir antics and exploits have captured the popular imagination, and they have had some success in saving portions of the wilderness from d estruction.

But due to the lack of a significant working class pow er base, the efforts of radical environmentalists have resulted in few lasting victories. They are not getting their message across to their potentially most powerful allies-unionists and unorganized working people. Indeed, many of these people feel alienated from environmentalists’ direct-action tactics, which ap pear to them to

•?,C Prpduct*v'ty and the American Dream , which they are often still striving to attain for themselves.

by a vision of a m ore j ust and equitable society, for C aSS ° i p n‘zal‘ons have Opposed capitalism and the suite

n unes. he fact that these two forces are not only unjust

Anarchism &: Environmental Survival 65

and au th oritarian , hut also extrem ely environmentally destructive, only confirm s the in h eren t wisdom of centuries of radical working class organization . T he h eroic resistance of working class organizations to state-sponsored capitalist exploitation represents a long and bloody history involving the useless m urder and ruthless torture o f millions o f ordinary people, whose only crim e was to attem pt to p ro tect their families, com m unities, and natural resources from being sacrificed for the short-term benefit of the rich and powerful. Radical environmentalists, in contrast, are relative new com ers to the art o f organized resistance, and have yet to digest the hard historical fact that the insdtutions of state-sponsored exploitation can n ot be defeated without the com m itm en t o f large sections o f the majority of our population— that is, the p o o r and working classes—to the Green cause.

T he tragic lack o f com m unication between eco-activist groups and unions has deprived the ecology m ovem ent of an effective power base. It has led, for exam ple, to the absurd situation in Australia o f G reen activists fighting with rank-and-file m em bers of w oodw orkers’ unions, whose m em bers are unaware that gross corp orate m ism an agem en t, not latter-day conservation efforts, is the true cause o f forest depletion and jo b loss. T here is a lesson for both G reens and workers alike in these absurd showdowns— that the real enem ies are the greedy and short-sighted institutions of capital and state, n ot ou r near-individually powerless fellow citizens. Both parties would be better served by joining together and w orking towards a grassroots, revitalized and ecologically inform ed union m ovem ent which, if not capable (for the time being) o f overthrow ing the forces of the rich and powerful, would at least be able to resist the worst excesses of the present order. T hat the welfare o f working people is intimately dependent upon a healthy en viron m en t is an undeniable fact, and both eco- activists and unionists should try to improve their comm unication and to find co m m on ground.

In advocating craftsm anship on the one hand, and large industrial plants run by robots on the other (in Towards a Liberatory Technology) , Bookchin seems to contradict himself. He has never to my knowledge endorsed any kind oi anti- technological viewpoint, which makes his anti-union stance all the m ore puzzling. How is one to design, m anufacture, and recycle


the environmentally friendly eco-technologies to which he so frequently refers without utilizing the skills and resou rces ol industrial workers? Although working people now form the backbone of our profoundly destructive oil-steel-coal industrial culture, their proven skills could also turn m unitions factories into wind generator m anufacturing plants, and ou r agri-business wastelands into productive farms. The wise ecologist recognizes the need to move away from large-scale industrial activity, but knows that our present factories are the places, in coop eration with research institutions, that should begin to design and manufacture the eco-friendly technologies o f tom orrow . A successful end to this period of transition and technological readjustment clearly cannot be achieved without the coop eration of the industrial workforce.

Bookchin goes on to insult Am erican anarchists and trade unionists of the past. "These im migrant socialists and anarchists (presumably referring to such people as E m m a G oldm an, Alexander Berkman, and the Haymarket martyrs) "were largely unionists rather than revolutionary Utopians," and had little understanding of A m erica’s dem ocratic traditions. If the American people had ignored the "narrow" and "class-based" ideologies of these anarchist and socialist foreigners, and instead upheld the individualistic values of the Am erican Constitution, concretely enshrined in the small town meetings o f New England, an authentic American radicalism could, in B ookchin’s view, have taken firmer root, and a decentralized vision of a free A m erican republic could have becom e a reality:

Irish direct action, German Marxism, Italian anarchism and Jewish socialism have always been confined to the ghettoes of American social life. Combatants of a pre-capitalist world, these militant European immigrants stood at odds with an ever-changing Anglo-Saxon society . . . whose constitution had been wrought from tlie struggle for Englishmen’s rights, not against feudal satraps. Admittedly these "rights" were meant for white men rather tban people of color. But rights they were in any case-universal, inalienable rights" that could have expressed higher ethical and

po meal aspiraUons than the myths of a "workers party" or the day

r Bl? Uni° n’” l° dle the illusions of socialists andy calists alike. Had the Congregationalisi town-meeting con-


ception of democracy been fostered . . . and the middle classes been joined to the working classes in a genuine people’s movement instead of being fractured into sharply delineated class movements, it would be difficult to predict the innovative direction American social life might have followed. Yet never did American radicals, foreign born or native, ask why socialist ideas never took root outside the confines of the ghettoes, in this, the most industrialized country in the world.3

Again, what sense is one to make o f such comm ents? Bookchin accuses A m erican radicals of the past of having a “ghetto” outlook, yet it is precisely this group of people—"ethnics,” “unem ployables,” and “the ‘g h etto ’ people"—whom Bookchin identifies in a passage quoted above as representing the new revolutionary "classless class" o f people who will somehow organize the coop erative suburban comm unities of the future social ecological o rd er. Ironically, it was the "ethnic,” “unem ployable” and “gh etto people" of the 19th and early 20th centuries, o f whom B ookchin speaks so disparagingly, who led the m ovem ent to form unions, leading ordinary working people to fight for O n e Big U nion.

M oreover, the specific organization to which Bookchin refers, the Industrial W orkers o f the W orld or IWW, was not, as he suggests, unap p ealing to "native" Americans. Rather, it was brutally an d systematically sm ashed by the com bined forces of federal and state military and judicial might. Many IWW organizers— and the m em bers they signed up— risked life and limb and had little stake in the com fortable, middle-class vision of small town life o f which Bookchin speaks.

Finally, in em b racin g unionism , anarcho-syndicalists do not, as Bookchin claim s, have som e naive or mystical faith in the ability of working class cu ltu re to save the world. They do not share the m arxist vision o f a w orkers’ paradise; they merely say that if we want to crea te a m ore balanced and equitable world, a good place to start is in the w orkplace.

G roups o f p eace protesters and environmentalists singing songs outside n u clear bases can n o t by themselves be an organizational basis for sustained national resistance to the state/capitalist system. Unless die telephones, railways, and other vital industrial systems con tin u e to function from the m om ent the state/capitalist


order begins to crum ble, Bookchin’s ideas will rem ain n othing but a pipe dream . Nor is the bringing togeth er o f millions of workers— in unions— in a general strike an end in itself, rath er, it is the best vehicle for producing a m ovem ent that is capable of resisting military and econom ic monopoly, and, ultimately, of

replacing the present order.This is not to say that the industrial system which has led our

planet to/Uhe brink of catastrophe need not u nd ergo radical change, but rather that while it must undergo profound ch an ge, this does not mean that industrial unionism should disappear. On the contrary, an ecologically inform ed and regen erated union movement could do much to initiate the needed transform ation. The boycotting of environmentally dam aging substances and industrial practices, an insistence upon safe and healthy working conditions, the production of socially necessary goods an d services based on need rather than profit, and a de-emphasis on dem ands for high wage increases in favor of m ore workplace dem ocracy, are all issues capable of realization by traditional m eans. Strikes, walkouts, sit-ins, and sabotage would undoubtedly bring about changes in our industrial infrastructure m ore quickly than environmental legislation and any num ber of health food stores. The Green Ban in Australia, for exam ple, is the nam e given to the successful refusal of dockworkers and transportation workers to handle environmentally harmful cargo. In fact, the failure of the Green movement to get its message across to ordinary workers and union members has resulted in significant dam age to G reens, working people, and the environment.

Further evidence ol Bookchin ’s attem pt to distance him self and his theory of social ecology from the m ainstream o f anarchist thought can be found in his recent book, The Philosophy o f Social Ecology (1990 ), in which he attempts to provide a philosophical basis for his social ecological theories. Unfortunately, the rich ecological content of anarchist philosophy is largely unacknowledged, Bookchin deals only briefly with an arch ism ’s tra itional focus on natural models of nonhierarchy anti noncentnsm . Instead, Bookchin presents us with an intellectual

istory of the development of social ecological thought, devoting many pages to Diderot’s "sensibilities" and H egel’s "co n cep t of spirit at the expense ol Kropotkin’s ethical naturalism and


Reclus’ b ioregionalism —con cep ts which, at least in the case of Kropotkin, con tain im portant ethical insights that seem to have contributed significantly to the developm ent of Bookchin's own thinking. The Philosophy o f Social Ecology, subtitled Essays on Dialectical Naturalism, directs readers who wish to find out m ore about the philosophical basis of social ecology and ecological ethics to study the notoriously cloudy pages of H egel’s Phenomenology o f Spirit.

T he reasons for B ook ch in ’s disillusionment with the organized anarchist m ovem ent m ust rem ain a m atter for speculation. A generous exp lan ation o f his objectives is that he wishes to produce an ecological alternative that does not scare people off by using the em otionally loaded and popularly misunderstood term , "an arch y," m eanw hile integrating into a broadly anti-statist fram ework the anarchistic ideas floating around in the peace, environm ental, and fem inist movem ents. If this is indeed his intention he has, in my opinion, been quite successful. His theory o f social ecology is presen ted in a rational and secular format that permits m eaningful dialogue with subscribers to other bodies of thought.

T o be fair, B ookchin does acknowledge the influence of anarchist th eoretician and geograp h er Peter Kropotkin in all of the above-m entioned works. However, he does so only in passing, and certainly exhibits no real desire to deal with Kropotkin’s thought in the detail that it deserves. The themes with which both Bookchin an d Kropotkin deal are, of course, not new; the battles between n atu re and the profit motive, freedom and tyranny, and liberty an d authority, have been with us since the beginning of hum an society, and n eith er Bookchin nor Kropotkin originated the an arch ist position. N onetheless, with the im portant exception of his analysis o f the developm ent of patriarchy, all of the basic com p on ents o f B ook ch in ’s social ecological vision—diversity, d ecentralization , com plem entarity, alternative technology, municipal socialism , self-sufficiency, and direct dem ocracy—are found in the works o f the great anarchist thinkers of the past. F.lisee Reclus and P eter Kropotkin both advocated a global federation ol autonom ous and ecologically integrated cities and towns, Bookchin has d o n e us the service o f updating these ideas and presenting them in m od ern form.

However, to take all the major ecological insights o f anarchist theory and practice and dress them up in a socialist-feminist cum neo-hegelian garh, and then go on to m ore or less claim them as his own is reprehensible. And to actively m isrepresent the movement from which these ideas originally cam e is an intellectual outrage.


1. Towards an Ecological Socuty, by Murray Bookchin. Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1980, pp. 123-126.

2. The Modem Crisis, by Murray Bookchin. Montreal: Black Rose Books, ch. 4.3. The Modem Crisis, chapter 4.

Anarchism, Feminism, and the Green Revolution

The Concept of “Home”

A c c o r d in g to the O xford English Dictionary, eco is derived from oikos, m ean in g house or hom e place. O f course, the Greek con cept o f h om e can be understood in its broadest sense to mean "vicinity," covering anything from the backyard veggie patch to the entire b iosphere. T he veggie patch is "hom e" to a colony of spiders; they, in turn (like it o r n ot), are part of your "hom e"; and planet E arth is, o f cou rse , "hom e" to all known organic life forms. But in day-to-day life, h om e is associated with the domesdc sphere, the individual household, and, to a lesser extent, the com m unity. It is the place where children are reared and humanity m eets its prim ary needs.

As the an arch ist and ecoregional r/evolution progresses, the dom esuc sp here o f life will be increasingly recognized as central to econ om ic and political life. While acknowledging its positive aspects, m any W estern wom en (and m en) feel that the domestic sphere has b eco m e a place o f isolation and servitude for women, and that the an arch ist r/ev olu tion will, at best, only partially succeed unless dom estic work is given respect and social rem uneration. Social and cultural einancipauon must accompany the liberation o f the local econom y from the grasps of state and capital, o r we will have gained little. Failure to recognize this fact is one im p ortan t reason why som e small-scale comm unal experiments have so consistently failed to retain female members, upon whom the bulk o f dom estic responsibilities have usually fallen.

Anarchists have been aware of this issue for generations. I he great 19th-century Russian nihilist, anarchist, and bio-geographer,

However, to take all the major ecological insights o f anarchist theory and practice and dress them up in a socialist-feminist cum neo-hegelian garb, and then go on to m ore or less claim them as his own is reprehensible. And to actively m isrepresent the movement from which these ideas originally cam e is an intellectual outrage.


1. Towards an Ecological Society, by Murray Bookchin. Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1980, pp. 123-126.

2. The Modem Crisis, by Murray Bookchin. Montreal: Black Rose Books, ch. 4.3. The Modem Crisis, chapter 4.

Anarchism, Feminism, and the Green Revolution

The Concept of “Home”

A c c o r d in g to the O xford English Dictionary, eco is derived from oikos, m ean in g house o r hom e place. O f course, the Greek con cept o f h om e can be understood in its broadest sense to mean "vicinity," covering anything from the backyard veggie patch to the entire biosp here. T h e veggie patch is "hom e" to a colony of spiders; they, in turn (like it o r n ot), are part of your "home"; and planet E arth is, o f cou rse , "hom e" to all known organic life forms. But in day-to-day life, h om e is associated with the domestic sphere, the individual household, and, to a lesser extent, the com m unity. It is the place where children are reared and humanity m eets its prim ary needs.

As the an arch ist and ecoregional r/evolution progresses, the dom estic sp here o f life will be increasingly recognized as central to econ o m ic and political life. While acknowledging its positive aspects, m any W estern wom en (and m en) feel that the domestic sphere has b eco m e a place o f isolation and servitude for women, and that the an arch ist r/ev olu tion will, at best, only partially succeed unless dom estic work is given respect and social rem uneration. Social and cultural emancipation must accompany the liberation o f the local econom y from the grasps of state and capital, o r we will have gained little. Failure to recognize this fact is one im p ortan t reason why som e small-scale communal experiments have so consistently failed to retain female members, upon whom the bulk o f dom estic responsibilities have usually fallen.

Anarchists have been aware of this issue for generations. The great 19th -cen tu ry Russian nihilist, anarchist, and bio-geographer,

72 Anarchism, Feminism, and the Green Revolution

Peter Kropotkin, understood that the area of dom estic work would have to be much m ore seriously addressed by male anarchists and socialists if a free and equal society was to b ecom e a reality. Although some of Kropotkin’s ideas about dom estic technology and com m unal organization seem a little odd and old- fashioned today, the spirit of what he said in The Conquest o f Bread remains relevant:

A society regenerated by the Revolution will make domestic slavery disappear—this last form of slavery, perhaps the most tenacious, because it is also the most ancient. Only it will not come about in the way dreamt of by Phalansterians [advocates of a type of hierarchically organized socialist community first proposed by Charles Fourier], nor in the manner often imagined by authoritarian Communists. . . .

A phalanstery, which is in fact nothing but an immense hotel, can please some, and even all at a certain period of their life, but the great mass prefers family life (family life of the future, be it understood). . . . Isolation, alternating with time spent in society, is the normal desire of human nature. This is why one of the greatest tortures in prison is the impossibility of isolation, much as solitary confinement becomes torture in its turn, when not alternated with hours of social life.

Other Socialists reject the phalanstery. But when you ask them how domestic work can be organized, they answer: "Each can do his own work.' My wife manages the house; the wives of bourgeois

will do as much." And if it is a bourgeois playing at Socialism who speaks, he will add, with a gracious smile to his wife: "Is it not true, darling, that you would do without a servant in a Socialist society? \ou would work like the wife of our good comrade Paul or the wife of John the carpenter?" Servant or wife, man always reckons on woman to do the housework.

But woman, too, at last claims her share in the emancipation of humanity. She no longer wants to be the beast of burden of the house. She considers it sufficient work to give many years of her life to the rearing of her children. She no longer wants to be the cook, the mender, the sweeper of the house!

Households are emerging from their present state of isolation; they begin to associate with other households to do in common w at they did separately. In fact, in the future we shall not have a

rus mg machine, a machine for washing up plates, a third for mg men, and so on, in each house. "Fifty fires burn," wrote


an American woman the other day, "where one would suffice!" Dine at home, at your own table, with your children, if you like; but only think yourself, why should these fifty women waste their whole morning to prepare a few cups of coffee and a simple meal! Why fifty fires, when two people and one single fire would suffice to cook all these pieces of meat and all these vegetables? Choose your own beef or mutton to be roasted if you are particular. Season the vegetables to your taste if you prefer a particular sauce! But have a single kitchen with a single fire, and organize it as beautifully as you are able to.

Why has woman’s work never been of any account? Why in every family are the mother and three or four servants obliged to spend so much time at what pertains to cooking? Because those who want to emancipate mankind have not included woman in their dream of emancipation, and consider it beneath their masculine dignity to think "of those kitchen arrangements," which they have put on the shoulders of that drudge—woman.

To emancipate woman is not only to open the gates of the university, the law courts, or the parliaments to her, for the "emancipated" woman will always throw domestic toil on to another woman. To emancipate woman is to free her from the brutalizing toil of kitchen and washhouse; it is to organize your household in such a way as to enable her to rear her children, if she be so minded, while still retaining sufficient leisure to take her share of social life.

It will come. As we have said, things are already improving. Only let us fully understand that a revolution, intoxicated with the beautiful words, Liberty, Equality, Solidarity, would not be a revolution if it maintained slavery at home. Half of humanity subjected to the slavery of the hearth would still have to rebel against the other half.

In this passage, K ropotkin is responding to Charles Fourier s assertions ab ou t the organization o f domestic labor, made neaily a century earlier:

[W om en are] unproductive because they are absoibed in household work, which entails the wasteful duplication of functions . . . O ne o f the principal savings of the combined oidei will result from the gathering together of all minor domestic jobs or household tasks. 1


As Kropotkin points out. though, hum an beings do not necessarily want to institutionalize social life and its "m inor" domestic tasks by, for exam ple, cooking and eating tog eth er every day around long tables, as is com m on in boarding schools and monasteries. In our society at least, most people would probably prefer to have the choice of eating in their own hom es or apartments (perhaps through a centrally cooked “take-out” arrangem ent as was attem pted in some early 20th century A m erican experim ents), or else at family tables inside com m un al dining rooms. But the idea that every house should have its own washing machine, large kitchen, fully equipped ch ild ren ’s play areas, etc., is not only extrem ely environmentally destructive, but hugely multiplies the am ount of domestic work that needs to be done. Domestic and neighborhood planning and arch itectu re should aim to minimize waste and maximize options for both social interaction and privacy. Community daycare cen ters, laundry facilities, and vegetable gardens should be located in such a way that, although family and private life will be respected and the private apartm ent or cottage retained, the self-contained house, cram med full of wasteful appliances, will disappear.

Not much will have changed, though, if only wom en do the laundry— and for no pay; and it doesn’t m atter greatly w hether they’d do it at hom e or in com m unal laundries. This is on e place where social anarchists and feminists agree that fundam ental cultural change is needed. A truly com m unal ap proach to domestic labor requires recognition of the real skills involved in this work, extensive neighborhood cooperation am on g women (and m en ), and a much m ore responsible attitude on the part of men. All facets of domestic m anagem ent and labor m ust involve both genders, whether inside individual households, in neighborhood domestic workplaces, or both.2

Changes in the m anagem ent and perform ance of dom estic labor are clearly necessary to the eco/h ou se-revolution . Additionally, maintaining a vegetable patch, participating in the local tree-planting brigade, collecting vegetable wastes, and recycling are new types of domestic labor, at least in the W est, whose vo ume is likely to greatly increase as humanity redesigns its towns and ciues according to Green principles. Thus, while m en should per orm t eir (over) due share of traditional dom estic labor and


participate equally in com m un al dom estic work, both sexes will share exp an d ed "domestic'' duties encom passing comm unity and b io re g io n -tre e planting, gardening, river cleaning, weeding of local w oodlands, landscaping, environm ental cleanup, etc. The artificial separation betw een hom e and social life initiated by the Industrial Revolution will break down; household, community, and bioregion will provide different kinks of opportunities for the intimacy and privacy that we associate with "hom e."

Women and Anarchism

A narchism has always attracted a great many intellectually gifted and d eterm in ed w om en. O ne was French com m unard Louise M ichelle ( 1 8 3 0 - 1 9 0 5 ) , nicknam ed the Red Virgin, whose love o f n atu re , w om en, anim als, and liberty dance across every page of h er Memoirs. T h e practical steps that she took to help animals, the p oo r, and h er fellow female teachers are still able to inspire us all. E m m a G oldm an (1 8 6 9 -1 9 4 0 ) who, unlike Michelle, was a lover o f m en , clearly understood that there was a specifically w om en’s politics which had been stifled by the affairs of men and Victorian stuffiness tow ard sexuality. Em m a Goldman worked actively with w om en in the textile industry, and served several jail terms, including a sen ten ce for "illegally" distributing free condoms and providing inform ation on safe sex and contraception.

W hereas M ich elle’s writings are scattered and incomplete, convincing us o f the righteousness o f w om en’s call for liberation largely through h er passion, Goldm an was a consum mate feminist and an arch ist thinker whose rational ideas and arguments were presented in a large body o f work. Born in a Jewish ghetto in Tsarist Russia in 1869 , Goldm an began working in a St. Petersburg factory shortly after finishing elementary school, reaching w om anh ood arou n d the same time as the Nihilist m ovem ent was at its height. Com ing from an authoritarian and patriarchal family, she was deeply influenced by the Nihilist women, who espoused independence, self-education, and a willingness to give their lives for the ideals they cherished. At the age o f 16, G oldm an fled to A m erica to avoid the humiliation of an arran ged m arriage and the narrowness of ghetto life. She


converted to anarchism after the 1887 legal m u rd er o f the Haymarket martyrs in Chicago, and becam e a distinguished agitator, activist and writer. H er analysis and criticism of the Suffragist m ovem ent has m uch to say to the middle class wing ol today’s w om en’s movem ent; she was sharply critical ol the Suffragists, who were, with a few notable exceptions, deeply racist and classist at heart, and merely interested in piecem eal legislative reforms. The legal and econom ic “freedom s" acco rd ed to wom en have led, as Goldman prophesized, to the liberation o f neither women nor men. H er m ore general and considered statem ents about wom en’s emancipation rem ain as relevant today as they were in her own time:

The development of woman, her freedom, her independence, must come from and through herself. First, by asserting herself as a personality, and not as a sex commodity. Second, by refusing the right to anyone over her body; by refusing to bear children, unless she wants them; by refusing to be a servant to God, the State, society, the husband, the family, etc., by making her life simpler, but deeper and richer. That is, by trying to learn the meaning and substance of life in all its complexities, by freeing herself from the fear of public opinion and public condemnation. Only that, and not the ballot, will set woman free, will make her a force hitherto unknown in the world, a force for real love, for peace, for harmony; a force of divine fire, of life-giving; a creator of free men and women.5

The reason for the interest of women like Louise M ichelle and Emma Goldman in anarchism during the 19th and early 20th centuries is not hard to discern. Two centuries ago, Mary Wollstonecraft, the early British feminist and proto-anarchist, wrote at length exposing the tyrannical nature of patriarchy. H er mockery of the pomposity and idiosyncracies of m ale-dom inated domestic and public life underscored the necessity o f a multi- aceted attack upon all hierarchical cultural institutions. The

following extended passage illustrates the fact that at a very early date discerning thinkers realized that freedom and fem ale emancipation were closely related:


It is vain to expect virtue from women till they are, in some degree, independent of men; nay it is vain to expect that strength of natural affection which would make them good wives and mothers. Whilst they are absolutely dependent on their husbands they will be cunning, mean, and selfish, and the men who can be gratified by the fawning fondness of spaniel-like affection have not much delicacy, for love is not to be bought. . . .

[I]n the education of women, the cultivation of the understanding is always subordinate to the acquirement of some corporeal accomplishment; even while enervated by confinement and false notions of modesty, the body is prevented from attaining that grace and beauty which relaxed half-formed limbs never exhibit. Besides, in youth their faculties are not brought forward by emulation; and having no serious scientific study, if they have natural sagacity it is turned too soon on life and manners. They dwell on effects and modifications, without tracing them back to causes; and complicated rules to adjust behavior are a weak substitute for simple principles. . . .

As a proof that education gives this appearance of weakness to females, we may instance the example of military men, who are, like them, sent into the world before their minds have been stored with knowledge or fortified by principles. The consequences are similar; soldiers acquire a little superficial knowledge, snatched from the muddy current of conversation, and from continually mixing with society, they gain what is termed a knowledge of the world; and this acquaintance with manners and customs has frequently been confounded with punctilious politeness. Where is then the sexual difference when the education has been the same?All the difference that I can discern arises from the superior advantage of liberty, which enables the former to see more of life.4

W riting several d ecades later, the French “utopian” socialist Charles F o u rier m ou n ted an unrelenting attack upon patriarchy which con clu d es by advising women to give up attempting to com pete with m en in a male world. (Fourier seems curiously unaware o f the irony o f a male writer, advocating the liberation of w om en, advising wom en that they should not com pete with m en, and, specifically, that they should not bother with the banal glory o f writing books”!) Instead, he advises, women should becom e "liberators" who will fight the institutions of patriarchy from the outside, and thereby "raise their sex from degradation

78 Anarchism, Feminism, and die Green Revolution

Man already seems to have a premonition of the futuie, he becomes indignant and alarmed when women belie the prejudicewhich accuses them of inferiority . . .

Why should women have bothered about the banal glory of writing books, of adding a few volumes to the millions of useless ones already in existence? What women should have produced was not writers but liberators, a political Spartacus, a genius who would devise means of raising their sex from degradation/

Deeply influenced by the writings of Fourier, the Nihilists of 19th century Russia sought to overthrow Tsardom and initiate free federations of ecologically integrated and self-determ ining peasant villages. The Nihilists were largely com posed o f middle- class women who had becom e disgusted with a society which treated them as playthings. Before they were p ersecuted , imprisoned, exiled, and executed in the thousands-repression which forced them to continue their political activities u nd erground—these women exhibited their con tem p t for Russian society by cutting their hair short and wearing practical working clothes. Peter Kropotkin (fellow Nihilist and, later, geo grap h er and anarchist theoretician) said of the ch aracter and outlook of the Nihilist comrades:

Marriage without love, and familiarity without friendship, were equally repudiated. The nihilist girl, compelled by her parents to be a doll in a Doll’s House, and to marry for property’s sake, preferred to abandon her house and her silk dresses. She put 011 a black woolen dress of the plainest description, cut off her hair, and went to a high school, in order to win there her personal independence. The woman who saw that her marriage was 110 longer a marriage, that neither love nor friendship connected those who were legally considered husband and wife, preferred to break a bond which retained none of its essential features. Accordingly she often went with her children to face poverty, piefering loneliness and misery to a life which, under conventional conditions, would have given a perpetual lie to her best self.6

Thus, the piogressive wing of m odern feminism has roots which extend much farther back and m uch wider than the narrow, middle-class, American suffrage m ovem ent; and one of the most important of those roots is anarchism .


Ecology and Eco-Feminism

The near-sim ultaneous developm ent of the anti-nuclear, peace, w om en’s, and ecology m ovem ents has led to the involvement of large n um bers o f w om en in G reen issues. The fact that women have a history and a cu ltu re that is m ore peaceful than that of men has led to the participation in—and leadership by—large num bers o f w om en in the environm ental movement. That women may have co m e to G reen ideas from paths that differ from those taken by m en does not, however, support the underlying argum ent o f som e eco-fem inists—that women have an inborn, “unique” relationship with n ature (rath er than a learned, cultural tendency toward n u rtu rin g b eh avior). This is an assertion that can never be proven, any m ore than the assertions that the pope has a special and privileged relationship with God, or that the Jews are “G od ’s ch osen p eo p le .” Each o f us experiences nature in our own way, acco rd in g to the peculiarities of our personalities and individual exp erien ces, and there is no reason to suppose that o n e’s gen d er is o f overriding im portance in this respect.

T hat w om en have been ill-treated and oppressed under patriarchy is indisputable, and for this reason women as women have had to fight a sep arate revolution. It is far from complete; there are still m any im portan t areas in which women must continue to fight, and m en to change. The eco-social anarchist revolution involves issues and dem ands activity in all areas of life, at least som e o f which are o f no special concern to women. While it is clear that o n e can be both a feminist and an environmentalist, and that th ere are in some senses profound points of coincidence betw een the environm ental and feminist movements, eco-feminism alo n e—because o f its relatively narrow focus cannot form the basis for a durable social and political philosophy.

An attem p t has been m ade to construct such a philosophy along both secu lar and spiritual lines. The secular version argues, am ong o th er things, that because of w om en’s reproductive and nurturant functions, they are m ore closely related to, and suited to be the guardians of, n ature than are men. Although the Earth is undoubtedly in u rgen t need of nurturing, healing, and repaii, the idea o f som e cultural and eco-feminists that the nurture that


a m other bestows on her children makes h er inherently m ore capable than men of healing the Earth is biologically reductionist. Tbis is not to say that the experience o f paren th ood does not typically engender a deep appreciation of the natural processes of life-death-birth and renewal, and a generalized life-positive attitude in many women—but such attitudes and ap pieciations are accessible to nonparents and to m en, as well as to m others.

More generally, the ecological struggle ha the ability to draw people and nature together in a way that no o th er social and political m ovem ent of our lime can equal. In its assertion that the m ale/fem ale division should be considered the m ost im portant line of dem arcation in nature and society, radical fem inism is unhelpful and divisive, setting up battles within an ecology movement that is capable of superseding such useless in ternecine struggles. Ecology is not primarily con cern ed with the relationship between humans (m en, women, and children) and o th er life forms. It focuses, rather, upon relationships am ong all life forms, as well as between biotic (living) things and the abiotic (unliving) environments that they inhabit. Crude, bio-reductionist assertions about female (or male, or racial) superiority serve no good purpose; they only serve to divide the G reen m ovem ent—and other progressive movements—into antagonistic cam ps.

An attempt is also underway to prom ote belief in an in h eren t woman-nature connection via spiritual imagery: the tim e-honored metaphor of the Earth Goddess, or M other N ature. A dherents of this doctrine ask us to believe that the Earth is a goddess—or was created by an actual goddess— to whom hom age should be paid. This idea is closely linked with certain New Age philosophies.

The Sydney m orning Herald recently featured “New A ge” (supposedly alternative) bookshops and suppliers in its classified section, the advertisement filling up an entire page. Indeed, we may be sure that many millions of dollars are now m ade every year through the sale of magic crystals, mystical tracts, T aro t cards, and the like. Astrology, an ancient pseudo-science repopularized in the 1960s, and now very popular in New Age circles, has becom e a multi-million dollar industry, with an estimated 55 million believers in the U.S. alone. Belief in a Mother Goddess is undoubtedly a byproduct of starry-eyed “New Age and cultural feminist ideologies, and it’s a belief that has, in


some cases at least, w arped perspectives and seriously underm ined serious thinking in both the ecology and feminist movements.

At one tim e it was possible to laugh off or simply ignore the antics o f born-again “Jesu s Freaks," astrologers, and spiritual eco- feminists. This is no lon ger the case, as their ideas have spread like a seem ingly unstoppable brush fire within academ ia and within the radical fem inist and ecology movements. The now com m onplace a cce p ta n ce o f the questionable premise that astrology “is an organ ized body o f thought capable of ascertaining truth” is evidence en ou gh that New Ageism has already found fertile grou n d am o n g the populace.

In ou r em phasis upon replacing capitalism and the totalitarian state with the “free society,” anarchists in recent years have forgotten that religious indoctrination and impositions have been every bit as responsible as m ore secular forces for enslaving human m inds an d for perpetuating servile attidudes toward authority. F rom the tim e o f Mikhail Bakunin’s classical study, God and the State (w hich, interestingly, attacks the scientific academy as being as d an g ero u s as the organized ch u rch ), to Chaz Bufe’s recen t pam p hlet, Astrology: Fraud or Superstition} , anarchists have consistently stressed the idea that the attainm ent of a free and classless society is d ep en d en t upon humankind giving up both governm ent and organ ized religion. The em ergence of religiosity in new and increasingly popular “spiritual" forms in most cases represents a positive th reat to the goals and aspirations of the anarchist, fem inist, and environm ental movements, heralding the onset o f an o th e r Dark Age, not a New Age.

If this conclusion seem s extrem e, consider what Chaz Bufe says about religiosity/m ysticism (including “New Ageism") in his pam phlet, Listen Anarchist! :

While this may appear to be harmless lunacy, it’s not. Rejection of rationality and reversion to mysticism are serious problems. For once you abandon rationality, how do you determine right from wrong? How do you determine what’s in your best interest from what isn’t? Without rationality you have two choices: you can follow the leader and obey the prescriptions of others; or you can follow your impulses—do what “feels right”—a choice that moie often than not leads back to the fust.

Using unexamined impulse as a means of decision making is


very dangerous because we’ve all been subjected to constant authoritarian conditioning since birth, and our impulses will inevitably be influenced to some degree by that conditioning. For example, it obviously “fell righl to a large segment of the German working class to support Hitler during the 1020s and 30s. But was it in their self-interest to do so? Without rationally analyzing the question, how could they have known that what felt right to them was absolutely contrary to their own interests? Without rationality there was no way they could have known. Rational thinking was necessary, but they didn t do it. Instead, they goose- stepped into the holocaust with the mystical abstractions of god and fatherland dancing in their heads.

And if anarchists reject rationality and revert to mysticism, it's a safe bet that they too will go goose-stepping off in increasingly authoritarian directions.7

It is interesting to note, however, that a secular version o f the M other Earth concept (in which it is understood that the idea is nothing m ore than a m etaphor) has long existed in anarchist literature, harmlessly coevolving alongside rigorously scientific appraisals of the idea of the Earth as a living organism . Elisee Reclus, for exam ple, in his early work, The Earth , exp lored con cepts similar to today’s Gaia hypothesis. If you were to look for a resolutely secular exegesis of the Earth M other them e, you would be hard pressed to find a m ore poetic and well-crafted description of the ancient and tim e-honored m etaphor of the Earth as m other and provider than that given by Reclus. Likewise, it seems no accident that Emma Goldman chose to call h er long-running anarchist journal Mother Earth, or that Reclus used gen der ascription (h is/h er, m oth er/fath er, etc.) when referring to parts of nature.

If women (and m en) want to draw inspiration from the M other Earth m etaphor, that s fine. But to confuse myth and literature with philosophy, science, politics, and fact is simply wrong and ultimately dangerous. Literature and philosophy both have their place in our com prehension of natural life processes, but neither Goldman nor Reclus would have tolerated the abject confusion of myth and reality that certain strains of mystical ecology and radical feminism seem determ ined to prom ote.


Anarchism, Feminism, and Revolution

T he coevolution o f the patriarchal family and the state has always been o f con cern to anarchists. In his influential work, The Principle o f Federation, 19th-century anarchist thinker P.J. Proudhon analyzed the historical developm ent o f the state, concluding that it did not arise from population expansion and military expansion, but was in actual fact the logical extension of the patriarchal family. M odern and genuinely radical feminist thinking on the subject has greatly enriched many anarchists' p erceptions o f the role of patriarchy in the developm ent of hierarchical state structures. In The Ecology o f Freedom, Murray B ookchin exam ines the idea that the em ergence of hierarchy and the state resulted from gen der inequalities as well as inequalities am on g m en. Although simple differences in age am ong men (the old dom inating the young) contributed to the em ergence of hierarchy and eventually the state, anthropologists have docum ented that it is the appropriation of fem ale-created surplus products in horticultural chiefdom s by old and powerful men, and these sam e m en ’s need to control paternity and inheritance, that provided the germ s of hierarchy. Eventual statism /capitalism , however, is not reducible to male dom inance; it is critical to note that only a small percentage o f men benefited from high positions in the incipient-state hierarchies. The state—from beginning to end—has destroyed the moral and ecological fabric of the hum an com m unity; it is, and always has been, a social, econom ic, and political arran gem en t based upon raw power, in which the only people to benefit from the destruction of our planet are a handful of powerful men (and, increasingly, a few w om en).

As Fourier hoped, women have indeed becom e valiant liberators: Sophia Perovskaya, Louise Michelle, Voltairine de Cleyre, and Em m a Goldm an, to nam e but a few. In both her history and ch aracter, Louise Michelle is undoubtedly the “female Spartacus” which Fourier foretold; once, wielding a black flag, M ichelle successfully rallied the hungry of Paris to grab the bread they n eeded, by force of num bers alone. Em m a Goldman clearly understood that there were many sources of conflict in society and nature o th er that those between men and women; she knew

instinctively and through her own exp erien ce that unem ployed, im migrant, and working class factory women had little in co m mon with their com fortable, finely dressed, bourgeois sisters.

Even if the middle class wing of the w om en’s m ovem ent slowly manages to eliminate the last vestiges of sexual inequality from hom e, school, factory, legislature, and corp orate b oard room , the the state and capitalism will not necessarily disappear; M argaret Thatcher, Indira Gandhi, and others like them have ably adapted to statecraft. W omen are now well represented in the b ureaucratic classes, and a hierarchy com posed equally of women and m en at each level would not be m uch, if any, less totalitarian than a male- dominated hierarchy. Em m a Goldman clearly anticipated this situation at the beginning of this century in h er controversial essay, “W om en’s Suffrage":

Needless to say, I am not opposed to woman suffrage on the conventional ground that she is not equal to it. I see neither physical, psychological, nor mental reasons why woman should not have the equal right to vote with man. But that cannot possibly blind me to the absurd notion that woman will accomplish that wherein man has failed. . . . To assume . . . that she would succeed in purifying something which is not susceptible to purification is to credit her with supernatural powers. . . . Women who are at all conversant with the process of politics, know the nature of the beast, but in their self-sufficiency and egotism they make themselves believe that they have but to pet the beast, and he will become as gende as a lamb, sweet and pure. As if women have not sold their votes, as if women politicians cannot be bought? . . .

The American suffrage movement has been, until very recently, altogether a parlor affair, absolutely detached from the economic needs of the people. Thus Susan B. Anthony, no doubt an exceptional type of woman, was not only indifferent but antagonistic to labor; nor did she hesitate to manifest her antagonism when, in 1869, she advised women to take the places of striking printers in New York. I do not know whether her attitude had changed before her death.

There are, of course, some suffragists who are affiliated with working women-The Women’s Trade Union League, for instance; but they aie a small minority, and their activities are essentially economic. The rest look upon toil as a just provision of Providence. What would become of the rich, if not for the poor?



What would become of these idle, parasitic ladies, who squander more in a week than their victims earn in a year, if not for the eighty million wage workers? . . .

Few countries have produced such arrogance and snobbishness as America. Particularly is this true of the American woman of the middle class. She not only considers herself the equal of man, but his superior, expecially in her purity, goodness, and morality. Small wonder that the American suffragist claims for her vote the most miraculous powers. In her exalted conceit she does not see how truly enslaved she is, not so much by man, as by her own silly notions and traditions. Suffrage cannot ameliorate that sad fact; it can only accentuate it, as indeed it does.H

T o be fair, the labor and the w om en’s movem ents have been morally blind to each other. The early labor m ovem ent was indifferent to women at best, and hostile or patronizing to them at worst; and both m ovem ents tended, with notable exceptions, such as the IWW, to be racist as well.

T oday’s w om en’s m ovem ent is clearly not reducible to the rad ical/sep aratist and middle-class branches of feminism. W omen outside o f these groups are increasingly raising the very points that Goldm an did: that “w om en” is not a hom ogeneous category, and that wom en differ in class, race, ethnicity, location, m otherhood status, and age. Further, m ost serious feminists who argue that there are postivie aspects o f “w om en’s culture” do so on grounds o f culture and learning, not biology. Not all women, not even m ost, share the priority of “equal work for equal pay" so d ear to the middle-class w om en’s m ovem ent (which is not to say that it’s unim portant—-just that it’s one of many issues); instead, issues o f health , nutrition, safety, and survival loom large for working class and low incom e women around the world, including those who consciously unite around “w om en’s” causes.

A uthoritarian institutions create authoritarian people—people who wish to boss o th er people around, or who seek to manipulate and exploit nature and their fellow hum an beings for their own benefit. T he battle is not only, or even mainly, between men and w om en, but between authoritarians and egalitarians. While we allow massive power structures such as multinational corporations and national governm ents to dom inate society, we can never achieve a free and ecologically balanced system for either gender.


To paraphrase Murray Bookchin, it is the political, social, and econom ic culture of dom ination, upheld and perpetuated by the institutions of statism /capitalism , which is the ical enem y.

The state, capitalism, and patriarchy together p rom ote an evil, life-negating system based upon individual wealth, power, and prestige at the expense of all life on the planet; they may well destroy so much o f nature that the ecosystem will b ecom e unable to sustain life in the cycles of reproduction and evolution required for its continued existence. Nowhere is this m ore evident than in state attitudes toward hum an sexuality. In the past, classic patriarchal states perm itted (indeed, fostered) the rise of ascetically oriented, life-denying fundam entalist th eocracies based upon narrow and self-interested versions o f Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, or Christianity. Such systems were (and are) characterized by a twin denial of human sexual freedom and the humanity of women (and non-dom inant m en ). N ot coincidentally, they almost invariably display a “rape and ru in ” attitude toward nature as well. Wilhelm Reich’s writings on the suppression of healthy sexual attitudes during the rise o f fascism early in this century clearly dem onstrate the h orrors o f the “sexless” (in actuality, anti-sexual and anti-female) m odern state.

Today, the patriarchal state rem ains a m onstrous institution with the ability to unleash perhaps irreparable dam age upon the social, ecological, and moral fabric of hum an society. Unless dismantled, it will relentlessly pursue its logic of dom ination, exploitation, and destruction. Neither men nor wom en will ever achieve their full potential while statism /capitalism , in inextricable em brace with patriarchy, remain dom inant forces.

It is no accident that the two greatest anarchist writers and thinkers of the 19th century, Reclus and Kropotkin, were both professional geographers, who glimpsed that the future o f our planet lay not with the nation state but with a global federation of (m ore or less) self-sustaining com m unities, ecologically integrated with surrounding bioregions. These 19th century anarchists augued their case in terms of both social justice and ecology. This fact is overlooked by derivative m ovem ents such as deep ecology and some branches of the ecofem inist, p cace, unionist, animal lights, and antiwar movements. For many years, anarchists have been devising ways to overcom e statism /


capitalism ; today’s environm entalists and feminists would do well to pay closer attention to the ideas, successes, and failures of their anarchist predecessors (and con tem p oraries).

If it is to succeed, the anarchist eco-social r/evolution will require the com bined forces of all social movem ents con cern ed with justice. Oppression is multi-faceted; com batting its many aspects requires broadened consciousness and a multitude of interacting solutions. T he oppressor’s solution to the disorganized protests o f the oppressed has always been to unleash the centralized m ight of state violence and legal repression. Unless oppressed groups stop blathering about passing new laws on this or that issue, and instead realistically adm it that the various forms o f oppression will continue as long as we pay hom age to the institutions o f capital and state, no significant change will be possible. O u r species must overcom e the barriers of greed, prejudice and ignorance. Anarchists, in their relendess quest for justice, equality, and harm ony am ong all living things, applaud every small step that we make toward eliminating narrow self- interest. As two im portant m ovem ents con cern ed with justice and ecology, feminism and environm entalism will, if they are to succeed, converge into an anarchist quest—w hether that quest be known to them as “anarchy” or not.

1. Quoted in The Utopian Vision o f Charles Fourier: Selected Texts on Work, Love and Passionate Attraction. London: Jonathan Cape, 1971, pp. 130-131.

2. See Redesigning the American Dream: The Future o f Housing, Work, and Family Life, by Dolores Hayden. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.3. The Traffic in Women and Other Essays on Feminism. Seattle: Times Change Press, 1970, p. 63.4. A Vindication o f the Rights o f Women.

5. Fourier, op. cit.

6. Memoirs o f a Revolutionist7. Listen Anarchist!, by Chaz Bufe. Tucson, Arizona: See Sharp Press, 1992, pp. 19-20.8. The Traffic in Women and Other Essays on Feminism, pp. 53-61.


To paraphrase Murray Bookchin, it is the political, social, and econom ic culture of dom ination, upheld and p eip etu ated by the institutions of statism /capitalism , which is the real enem y.

The state, capitalism, and patriarchy together p rom ote an evil, life-negating system based upon individual wealth, power, and prestige at the expense of all life on the* planet, they may well destroy so much of nature that the ecosystem will b ecom e unable to sustain life in the cycles of reproduction and evolution required for its continued existence. Nowhere is this m ore evident than in state attitudes toward hum an sexuality. In the past, classic patriarchal states perm itted (indeed, fostered) the rise of ascetically oriented, life-denying fundam entalist theocracies based upon narrow and self-interested versions of Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, or Christianity. Such systems were (and are) characterized by a twin denial of human sexual freedom and the humanity of women (and non-dom inant m en ). N ot coincidentally, they almost invariably display a “rape and ru in ” attitude toward nature as well. Wilhelm R eich’s writings on the suppression of healthy sexual attitudes during the rise o f fascism early in this century clearly dem onstrate the h orrors o f the “sexless” (in actuality, anti-sexual and anti-female) m odern state.

Today, the patriarchal slate remains a m onstrous institution with the ability to unleash perhaps irreparable dam age upon the social, ecological, and moral fabric of hum an society. Unless dismantled, it will relentlessly pursue its logic of dom ination, exploitation, and destruction. Neither men nor women will ever achieve their full potential while statism /capitalism , in inextricable em brace with patriarchy, remain dom inant forces.

It is no accident that the two greatest anarchist writers and thinkers of the 19th century, Reclus and Kropotkin, were both professional geographers, who glimpsed that the future o f our planet lay not with the nation state but with a global federation of (m ore or less) self-sustaining com m unities, ecologically integrated with surrounding bioregions. These 19th century anarchists augued their case in terms of both social justice and ecology. This fact is overlooked by derivative m ovem ents such as deep ecology and some branches o f the ecofem inist, peace, unionist, animal rights, and antiwar movements. For many years, anarchists have been devising ways to overcom e statism /


capitalism ; today’s environm entalists and feminists would do well to pay closer attention to the ideas, successes, and failures of their anarchist predecessors (and con tem p oraries).

If it is to succeed, the anarchist eco-social r/evolution will require the com bined forces o f all social movem ents con cern ed with justice. Oppression is multi-faceted; com batting its many aspects requires broadened consciousness and a multitude of interacting solutions. The oppressor’s solution to the disorganized protests o f the oppressed has always been to unleash the centralized m ight o f state violence and legal repression. Unless oppressed groups stop blathering about passing new laws on this or that issue, and instead realistically adm it that the various forms o f oppression will continue as long as we pay hom age to the institutions of capital and state, no significant change will be possible. O ur species must overcom e the barriers of greed, prejudice and ignorance. Anarchists, in their relendess quest for ju stice, equality, and harm ony am ong all living things, applaud every small step that we make toward eliminating narrow self- interest. As two im portant movem ents con cern ed with justice and ecology, feminism and environm entalism will, if they are to succeed, converge into an anarchist quest—whether that quest be known to them as “anarchy” or not.

1. Quoted in The Utopian Vision o f Charles Fourier: Selected. Texts on Work, Love and Passionate, Attraction. London: Jonathan Cape, 1971, pp. 130-131.

2. See Redesigning the American Dream: The Future o f Housing, Work, and Family Life, by Dolores Hayden. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.3. The Traffic in Women and Other Essays on Feminism. Seattle: Times Change Press, 1970, p. 63.4. A Vindication o f the Rights o f Women.

5. Fourier, op. cit.6. Memoirs o f a Revolutionist7. Listen Anarchist.', by Chaz Bufe. Tucson, Arizona: See Sharp Press, 1992, pp. 19-20.8. The Traffic in Women and Other Essays on Feminism, pp. 53-61.

Anarchism & Animal Rights

F o r over a century anarchists have d eb ated the question of human-animal relations. It’s thus worth taking the time to examine the ideas and argum ents o f the 19th ce n tu ry anarchist-vegetarians in some detail.

Toward the end of his life, F ren ch social g e o g r a p h e r Elisee Reclus published his thoughts on the topic in a short article titled, “On Vegetarianism.” Although he insists that his early childhood experiences did not influence his views o n the evils of animal husbandry and m eat eating, Reclus begins his short study by outlining his innate feelings o f disgust for what he considered to be barbaric, retrograde practices:

First of all, I should say that my search for truth had nothing to do with the early impressions which m ad e m e a potential vegetarian while still a small boy. I have a distinct re m e m b ra n ce of horror at the sight of blood. O ne o f the family had sen t m e, plate in hand, to the village butcher, with the injunction to bring back some gory fragment. In all innocen ce I set ou t cheerfully to do as I was bid, and entered the yard where the slau gh term en were. 1 still remember this gloomy yard where terrifying m en went to and fro with great knives, which they wiped on blood-besprinkled smocks. Hanging from a porch an en orm ou s carcass seem ed to me to occupy an extraordinary am ount of space; from its white flesh a reddish liquid was trickling into the gutters. T rem b lin g an d silent 1 stood in this blood-stained yard, incapable o f going forward and much too terrified to run away. 1 do not know what h ap p en ed to me; it has passed from my mem ory. 1 seem to have h eard that 1 fainted, and that the kind-hearted b u tch er carried m e into his own house; 1 did not weigh m ore than o n e o f those lambs he slaughtered every morning.


Reclus found “m a n ’s” attempts to interfere with and improve upon n atu re a particularly disturbing aspect of 19th-century E u ro p e a n culture. H e argued that such domination resulted in part from a prehistoric ch an g e during which “m a n ” the hunter- g a th e re r stopped respecting the integrity o f nature and turned to animal husbandry, thereby interrupting the natural evolution of animal life. As his dom ination over n on h u m an life increased and ‘m a n ” began to actively select and breed domestic animals,

wilderness c a m e to be perceived as an increasingly dangerous place inhabited by wild, predatory beasts.

Absurd attem pts by “packs o f engineers” to “improve” a valley could, Reclus claim ed, be directly related to “m a n ’s” attem pt to achieve dom ination over ou r animal relatives:

It is on e of the sorriest results o f our flesh-eating habits that the animals sacrificed to m an ’s appetite have been systematically and methodically m ade hideous, shapeless, and debased in intelligence and m oral worth. T h e nam e even o f the animal into which the b oar has been transform ed is used as the grossest o f insults; the mass o f flesh we see wallowing in noisome pools is so loathsome to look at that we agree to avoid all similarity of nam e between the beast and the dishes we make out o f it. . . . A similar degradation has befallen the ox, which nowadays we see moving with difficulty in the pastures, transform ed by stock-breeders into an enorm ous am bulating mass o f geom etrical forms, as if designed beforehand for the knife o f the butcher. And it is to the reproduction of such monstrosities we apply the term “breeding!” This is how man fulfills his mission as ed u cator with respect to his brethren, the animals.

For that m atter, do we not act in like m anner towards all N ature? T u rn loose a pack o f engineers into a charm ing valley, in the midst o f fields and trees, or on the banks o f some beautiful river, and you will soon see what they would do. They would do everything in their power to put their own work in evidence, and to mask N ature un d er their heaps of broken stones and coal. All o f them would be proud, at the least, to see their locomotives streaking the sky with a trail o f dirty yellow or black smoke.

In a similar spirit the butchers display before the eyes o f the public, even in the most frequented streets, disjointed carcasses, gory chunks o f m eat, and think to placate o u r aesthetic senses by boldly decoratin g the flesh they dole out with garlands o f roses!

90 Anarchism and Animal Rights

Reclus did not hesitate to link m eat eating, violence, and warfare, concluding that despite the m acho mythology con nectin g meat eating, strength, and vigor, the physical condition of m eat eaters could not match the health, en d u ran ce, and in n er strength of people with tem perate eating habits:

It is not a digression to mention the* horrors of war in connection with the massacre of cattle and carnivorous banquets. The diet of individuals corresponds closely to their manners. Blood demands blood. On this point anyone who searches among his recollections of the people whom he has known will find there can be no possible doubt as to the contrast which exists between vegetarians and coarse eaters of flesh, greedy drinkers of blood, in amenity of manner, gentleness of disposition, and regularity of life. . . .

According to [meat-eaters], mildness signifies feebleness: the sick are only in the way, and it would be a charity to get rid of them. If they are not killed, they should at least be allowed to die. But it is just these delicate people who resist disease better than the robust. Full-blooded and high-coloured men are not always those who live longest: the really strong are not necessarily those who cany their strength on the surface, in a ruddy complexion, distended muscle, or a sleek and oily stoutness.

Questions of health, ecology, taste, or morals, however, pale before the real issue at stake in hum anity’s relationship with the animals: whether we will ever enter into a m ore natural coevolution with all other living, evolving things:

For the great majority of vegetarians, the question is not whether their biceps and triceps are more solid than those of the flesh-eaters, nor whether their body is better able to resist the risks of life and the chances of death . . . For them the important point is the recognition of the bond of affection and goodwill that links man to the so-called lower animals, and the extension to these our brothers of the sentiment which has already put a stop to cannibalism among men. The reasons which might be pleaded by anthropophagists against the disuse of human flesh in their customary diet would be as well-founded as those urged by or inary flesh-eaters today. I he arguments that were opposed to that monstrous habit [cannibalism] are precisely those we


vegetarians employ now. The horse and the cow, the rabbit and the capon, the deer and the hare, the pheasant and the lark, please us better as friends than as meat. We wish to preserve them either as respected fellow workers, or simply as companions in the joy of life and friendship.

Reclus did not trivialize the age-old philosophical contradiction between the vegetarian ideal and oth er hum an-nature interactions: If anim als should be spared, why not also trees and bacterial life? In a letter written around 1890, Reclus was hesitant about taking his principles to extrem e lengths, arguing that the liberation o f hum anity from state and capital would have to take place before liberation could be achieved for the vast majority of m en, w om en, children and animals.

But, so you asked me: “Do you exclude the animals?” This is certainly a weighty question. . . . For my part, I embrace also the animals in my affection of socialist solidarity. But I also say to myself: Everything is accomplished by degrees and the first duties begin around us. Let us realize justice in the largest circle we can, first in the civilized circle, then in the human circle. Each realization of a partial ideal will make us more sensible, more delicate for the future realization of a larger ideal. . . . My firm confidence has it that our harmonious society must embrace not only men, but all beings conscious of their lives. Where is the limit? I don’t know this, I only know that, it is beyond the animals killed to shoe us and to supply butcher’s meat.1

By the time he wrote “On Vegetarianism ” in 1901, Reclus had clarified his views on the relationship between hum an health, anim al freedom , and free coevolution. First, vegetarians should be tolerant of m eat-eaters, but the latter should have the com m on decency to at least hide the m ore bloodthirsty aspects of their habit from general view. Second, Reclus never em braced the m ore radical “veganist” position (n ot only no m eat, but no eggs o r dairy p rod ucts), and concludes his essay with a charm ing piece of French philosophical gastronom y that will alarm cholesterol worriers, but may yet prove to be true:


O ne thing is certain, that if we . . . [push] the practice o f o u r theory to its ultimate and logical consequences. . . we should fallinto simple absurdity____ It is clear that we have no intention ofsubordinating all our practices and actions . . . to a iespect for the life of the infinitely little; we shall not let ourselves die o f h u n ger and thirst, like some Buddhist, when the m icroscope has shown us a drop of water swarming with animalculae. We shall not hesitate now and then to cut ourselves a stick in the forest, o r to pick a flower in a garden; we shall even go so far as to take a lettuce, or cut cabbages and asparagus for our food, although we fully recognise the life in the plant as well as in animals. But it is not for us to found a new religion, and to ham per ourselves with a sectarian dogma; it is a question of making o u r existence as beautiful as possible, and in harmony, so far as in us lies, with the aesthetic conditions of our surroundings.

We want some day to live in a city where we shall no longer see butchers’ shops full of dead bodies side by side with d rap ers’ or

jewellers’, and facing a druggist s, o r hard by a window Filled with choice fruits, or with beautiful books, engravings o r statuettes, and works of art. We want an environm ent pleasant to the eye and in harmony with beauty. . . .

What then are the foods which seem to correspond b etter with our ideal of beauty both in their nature and in their needful methods of preparation? They are precisely those which from all time have been appreciated by men of simple life; the foods which can do best without the lying artifices of the kitchen. They are eKSs» grains, fruits. . . . Man gets them for his food without killing the being that provides them, since they are form ed at the point of contact between two generations. Do not our m en of science who study organic chemistry tell us, too, that the egg o f the animal or plant is the best storehouse of every vital elem ent?

It should be n o te d th at th e p r o m in e n t use o f th e w o rd “m a n ” th ro u g h o u t R eclu s’ w riting seem s at first sight to b e o ld -fa sh io n e d an d straightforw ardly sexist. U p o n c lo se r in s p e ctio n , h o w e v e r , o n e finds his use o f g e n d e r ascrip tio n is c o m p le x , sensitive, a n d highly relevan t to r e c e n t discussions a m o n g fem inists, a n a rc h is ts , a n d anim al rightists. T h a t is, his c o m m e n ts o n in te rs p e c ie s relationships a re a provocative in d ic tm e n t o f w h at is m o r e typically m an s, r a th e r th an “w o m a n ’s," t r e a tm e n t o f o u r n o n h u m a n c o m p a n io n s (a t least in th e W e st) :


O n e o f my strongest impressions of my childhood is that of having witnessed on e o f those rural dramas, the forcible killing of a pig by a party o f villagers in revolt against a dear old woman who would not consent to the m urder of her fat friend. T he village crowd burst into the pigsty and dragged the beast to the slaughter place where all the apparatus for the deed stood waiting, whilst the unhappy d am e sat down upon a stool weeping quiet tears. I stood beside h er and saw those tears without knowing whether I should sympathise with h er grief, o r think with the crowd that the killing o f the pig was just, legitimate, decreed by com m on sense as well as by destiny.2

Louise Michelle, a co m m u n a rd like Reclus and a lifelong friend o f Kropotkin, was famous for h er co n cern about animals. Like Reclus, Michelle was a lifelong vegetarian, a believer in scientific progress, and vehem ently opposed to animal experimentation. H e r words anticipate the con tem p orary animal rights m ovem ent as well as the developm ent o f vitamin-enriched supplements as alternatives to meat:

As far back as I can rem em ber, the origin o f my revolt against the powerful was my h o rro r at the tortures inflicted on animals. I used to wish animals could get revenge, that the dog could bite the man who was mercilessly beating him, that the horse bleeding u n d er the whip could throw off the m an torm enting him. But m ute animals always submit to their fate . . . and the m ore ferocious a m an is toward animals, the m ore that man cringes before the people who dom inate him. . . .

1 was accused of allowing my con cern for animals to outweigh the problem s o f hum ans [during the Paris C om m une uprising in 1871] when I ran to help a cat in peril. . . . The unfortunate beast was cro u ch ed in a co rn e r that was being scoured by shells, and it was crying out like a hum an being. . . .Why should I be so sad over brutes, when reasoning beings are so unhappy? T h e answer is that everything fits together, from the bird whose brood is crushed to the hum ans whose nests are destroyed by war. . . .

Even in a gutter like a laboratory, a beast is sensitive both to caresses and to brutalities. More often it feels brutalities. People find it interesting to torture a p oor animal to study mechanisms which are already well known. . . .

I dream o f the time when science will give everyone enough to eat. Instead of the putrefied flesh which we are accustom ed to


eating, perhaps science will give us chemical mixtures containing more iron and nutrients than the blood and meat we now absorb. The first bite might not flatter the palate as much as the food we now eat, but it will not be . . . rotten, and it will build stronger and purer bodies for men weakened by generations of famine 01 the excesses of their ancestors.s

Beyond the question of w hether animals or their products should be eaten or utilized is the extrem e notion that animals should never be used by humanity for any purpose whatsoever. Although we all want to preserve the free m ustang and the wild buffalo, the intelligent and hum ane use of already dom esticated animals such as horses, draft cattle, and many others, could do much to improve the environm ent. In Thailand, for instance, the use of m echanical vehicles has led to a worrying decline in the traditional use of elephants, and the forest is suffering as a result. In Australia, bullock trains were the traditional m ethod o f moving logs before the arrival of the bulldozer and semi truck. In British Columbia, the use of heavy horses to gently extract selectively harvested timber from forests under sustainable m an agem en t practices shows us a way to move logs without constructing roads or flattening the forest. The réintroduction of horses, elephants, and bullocks on farms and in forests could allow us to sustainably manage forest and transport agricultural products in a pollution- free, low im pact m anner.

Donkeys, horses, cattle, and oxen were the m ost com m on m ethod of hum an transportation within cities before the dom inance of the m otor car. (In our m odern city, things have becom e so congested that cars often move no faster than donkeys, let alone horses!) In the 19th century, m anure was collected from the streets and stables of Paris and shipped by barge to adjoining country districts. It was then used by gardeners, by means of hot-house horticulture in raised beds, to organically produce most of the city’s winter vegetables. Needless to say, fresh vegegables and the exhilarating exp erien ce of horseback riding are infinitely preferable to sm og and drive- through fast food oudets.

Carrier pigeons can also be used as an effective and cost-saving transport system. At the blood testing cen ter at C otentin, France, pigeons have been used for many years to transport blood


samples from outlying hospitals. In rural and m ountainous regions, the use of pigeons for transport would be much quicker and far less costly than the use of roads and m otor vehicles. T h ere is no reason why pigeons, currently considered a pest in many cities o f the world, could not be utilized as part of city-wide postage and m essage systems. They live for up to 20 years and are alm ost entirely reliable. T heir droppings, which now destroy the em bellishm ents on old and treasured buildings in many cities, coidd be contained to a great exten t in dovecotes, and could be used as m an u re in urban and com m unity gardens.

In the past, barn owls were encouraged to nest in specially con stru cted farm buildings in many parts o f Europe in ord er to con trol m ice. In Malaysia, this system has been successfully reintrod uced , and the num ber of barn owls there has doubled in recen t years.

In the past, many animals were welcomed into our fields, farms, and hom es because o f the useful services they perform ed for us. Cats and dogs have been used by hum ans to control pests and to guard ou r houses for thousands o f years; the relationship between people and their cats and dogs is often one o f love and symbiosis, not o f cruelty and exploitation.

But today, traditional breeds o f shire horses are kept alive only by enthusiasts. Barn owls are absent in many places because of the past use o f DDT and the present use o f oth er chem ical poisons to control m ice, all o f which poison the owls who eat them. And the few rem aining working elephants are given to circuses where they are shame-lessly displayed in sideshows, or else they are considered econom ically redundant and uselessly slaughtered. Thus, thousands of years o f careful horse breeding, the art of elephant husbandry, and the beautiful sight of the barn own at twilight are all threatened by the tractor, the earth-m over, and the indiscrim inate application o f inorganic chemicals. Even if we do n ot wish to exploit animals for their meat, increasing the hum ane em ploym ent o f animals would not only improve the environm ent but lead to a m ore fulfilling relationship with many creatures on ce considered vital to hum an life.

T he questions o f vegetarianism and animal rights are far from new to anarchists. While the ethical argum ents against both m eat eating and, especially, animal experim entation seem convincing,


the ecological argum ents against the h u m an e use o f animals and against meat eating seem, upon exam ination, to be far less so. This final argum ent (against m eat eating) is taken up in a separate essay. [See next essay— Ed.]

1. Elisee and Elit Reclus: In Memoriam, Joseph Ishill, ed. “L etter to Richard Heath."

2. “On Vegetarianism."

3. Memoirs, by Louise Michelle. University of Alabama Press, 1981, pp. 24-30.

Microlivestock, Economy, and Ecology

A n a rch o -e n v iro n m e n ta l is ts often p rom ote vegetarianism, o r at least call for minimizing the consum ption o f large livestock, on the grou nds that we must stop eating so high on the food chain. N ot to do so, they argue, channels too m uch grain to meat produ ction (it takes seven pounds o f grain to produce one pound o f beef) and dam ages the land through overgrazing. Thus many environmentalists, vegetarians, and vegans assert that livestock raising should be ab an d o n ed altogether.

T h e call to give up animal husbandry and to grow m ore beans and grains is only valid, however, where the land is suitable for permanent cultivation. Only a small percentage o f the E a r th ’s surface is arable, an d even m u ch o f this area can n o t be sustainably cultivated on a p e rm a n e n t basis. Approximately 70% of available land in developing countries is marginal o r forested, and is useful solely as a source o f animal forage. Livestock can process forage and inedible (to hum ans) waste-crop materials into food sources (m eat, milk, and eggs) with high vitamin and protein content. Beyond this, livestock p rod u ce a wide range o f extremely valuable byproducts. D ung is a fertilizer, soil stabilizer, and prized fuel source in areas w here timber is scarce. Hides, wool, fur, and feathers are often m o re valuable than milk, eggs, o r meat. Also, m any animals, including pigeons, ducks, and geese, feed themselves by scavenging, and in the process are m uch m ore effective in controlling weed and insect populations than are conventional chem ical spraying and furrowing procedures.

M eat eating is unlikely to disappear in the near future; n or is the co n tin u ed hunting o f wild gam e animals likely to be effectively controlled by governm ent en fo rcem en t agencies. The tragic failure o f efforts to prevent the poaching o f rhinos and

tigers in Africa, Asia, India, and China points to this fact. In New Guinea, for exam ple, the overhunting of wild gam e has led to a significant decline in num bers of once-com m on native animals. There die introduction of the domestic rabbit at the village level is seen by many people as an answei to this problem . Dom estic rabbits (unlike the wild species which have devastated Australia) cannot survive in the wild and are not invasive. They can be easily reared in small enclosures and fed on clover, thus providing fresh m eat for the villagers while lessening the dem and upon native animals.

It is a matter o f fact that many cultures consum e wild anim als as an integrated part of their cultural systems. Although we may wish to discourage m eat eating, it is unlikely that habits will change quickly enough to avoid extinction of many species of the larger game animals. If we arc to conserve animals and rainforests, as well as provide people living on marginal land with an adequate diet, then the adoption of animal husbandry using indigenous and non-convcntional livestock is absolutely essential. Small antelope, rodents, iguanas, jungle fowl, and o th er small native species have been hunted for generations in many parts o f the world; they typically thrive in areas which are com pletely unsuitable for conventional livestock or agriculture. If animals such as these could be ranched on a free-ranging basis in existing forests and savannahs, native fruits, tubers, herbs, and fungi would be preserved in the process.

Factory farming, feed lots, and animal testing, on the o th er hand, involve both cruel and environmentally dam aging practices that have no place in any society, let alone an anarchist one. Despite the fact that, for instance, in East Anglia (England) the straw and droppings from large-scale chicken farms are now being combusted in small-scale electricity generating stations, the excrem ent produced by lot-fed pigs and cattle continues to be a real hazard and a major pollutant of British waterways. Although sewage lagoons and worm farm ing can effectively and productively deal with these wastes, the conditions under which lot- fed animals are kept offends the sensibilities of even the most comm itted carnivore. Finally, the excesses of scientific experi- mentalism are far too ghasdy for alm ost anyone to endure. I cannot bear to even open an anti-vivisection pam phlet, as the

98 Microlivestock, Economy, and Ecology


pictures are simply too distressing. We should continue to protest these outrages, loudly and resolutely, since such practives horribly degrad e both animal and hum an dignity alike.

Animal and plant life have co-evolved for millions of years; the establishm ent o f integrated perm acultural systems in which anim als are integrated widi crops, forestry or aquaculture is absolutely essential for increasing the overall health and productivity o f the land. Thus, while vegetarianism may be desirable in term s o f ou r ethical relationship to other living things, from an ecological viewpoint the argum ents for it are far from com pelling.

The Advantages of Micro livestock

O ne reason why vegetarianism as a solution to the world’s environm ental problem s has gained currency in recen t years is diat agriculturists have focused upon breeding bigger and bigger catde. They have alm ost universally failed to study im provements in the gene pool of naturally occurring smaller species, or “m icrolivestock.’’ (T h e term “microlivestock” refers to small, edible animals such as rabbits and ducks, and smaller-than-normal versions o f gam e and farm animals, for exam ple, “m icropigs” and “m icrocatd e.”)

At present confined mainly to certain rural pockets in the Third W orld, where they are often critical to poor families’ survival, microlivestock could b ecom e valuable food and animal byproduct resources for all. T he advantages of raising microlivestock are myriad: they are less expensive; they are less risky to buy and m aintain (if a large cow dies, it is a m uch greater loss than if a small one dies); they give a faster return through their higher reproductive rates; it’s relatively easy to m atch herd size to available feed; drey can eat feed unsuitable for hum ans or larger livestock; in som e cases, they are m ore efficient converters of food than “n orm al” livestock; in areas without refregerauon, smaller animals com e in a readily consum ed package; women and children, as well as m en, can easily handle them ; they generally need litde veterinary care; and they require comparadvely litde space for feeding and handling.

In general, through utilizing smaller animals, hum anity could dramatically expand its food hase and decrease negative hum an impact on the environm ent. As noted above, many livestock can be raised on feeds that hum ans generally discard or ignore, while others collect minute am ounts of feed that would otherwise go unused. For exam ple, chickens and pigeons gather scattered seeds, turkeys and muscovies [ducks] gobble up insects, geese graze weeds, iguana feed in the tops of trees, antelope browse tree leaves, and capybara and grasscutters [large G hanaian rodents] eat reeds that are not eaten by cattle. Most im portantly, small breeds have often evolved by adapting to extrem ely harsh environments, and can flourish in areas usually deem ed completely unsuitable for the raising o f livestock. And microlivestock are potentially im portant for urban areas; if m ore people utilized small plots of urban land for integrated anim al/p lan t systems, we could substantially reduce the degrad ation of surrounding rural lands and relieve urban poverty and malnutrition worldwide.


Microbreeds of Cattle, Goats, Sheep, and Pigs

Although m icrocattle generally produce only m odest am ounts of milk, m anure, hides, blood, horn, bone and m eat p er anim al, the higher head count allows a herd to outyield genetically “improved” larger animals on a per acre basis. U n d er stressful conditions, the ability of m icrocattle to survive adversity makes them by far the most efficient kind of cattle. They tend to be active, econom ical, and agile in tight spaces, and are becom ing m ore com m on as draft animals in small fields, terraces, and paddies. The small hill cattle of Nepal, for exam ple, are valued because they can negotiate the steep slopes and narrow terraces of the Himalayas. The small h oof size and body weight of such microcattle also means that they cause m uch less soil dam age than conventional breeds. U nder hot and hum id conditions, they suffer less than larger cattle because of their greater ratio o f skin area to body mass. And, unlike larger varieties, m icrocattle have little or no difficulties in calving. Finally, many m icrocattle are remarkably resistant to disease. Some breeds in Africa are


resistant to trypanosomiasis, an indigenous parasite that makes large areas o f the con tin en t uninhabitable for cattle. The Dwarf W est African S horth orn , weighing less than 100 kg, is perhaps the smallest o f all cattle, and can be found thriving in the worst disease-infested areas. T he smallest cows are now only 60 centim eters tall, and can easily share the barnyard with poultry.

Although they are often disparaged for destroying vegetation on overgrazed lands, small goats provide excellent m eat and milk. T he A ngora and C ashm ere goats, often weighing less that 30 kg, p rod uce som e o f the finest and most valued fibers in the world.

Although sheep weighing less than 35 kg have been largely ignored , such m icrosheep could boost m eat, milk, skin, wool, and pelt production in many villages and small farms in Africa, Asia and Latin A m erica. They are adapted to p oor feeds and can graze in wastelands unsuited to any o th er livestock excep t less desirable animals such as goats and cam els. M icrosheep can graze rough grasses that are unpalatable to cattle, and have grazing habits that com p lem en t those o f goats. With their lesser dietary needs, m icrosheep can fatten in areas in which the forage preferred by larger breeds is so scattered that the latter cannot cover enough ground in one day to survive. Many breeds reproduce year-round, which allows for the continuous production o f prem ium m eat. M icrosheep cause little erosion, even on steep slopes or on heavily tram pled paths to and around water holes; in South Asia, they have been continuously stocked on the sam e ground for thousands o f years without causing any apparent harm . The Navajo sheep, which com es from a m uch m ore arid area o f Spain than does the M arino, was first introduced into North A m erica in 1540. W eighing less dian 30 kg when m ature, the Navajo sheep was on ce widely raised throughout the Am erican Soudiwest, and has recendy been pulled from the brink of extinction. Its unique wool m akes beautiful rugs; it can exist in the m ost arid deserts without supplem entär)' food and with very litde water; and it can successfully raise lambs in searing heat. T he small Soay sheep is used in Cornwall, England to graze banks of highly erodible china-clay soil too unstable for heavier animals. M icrosheep are also used in som e places, rather than expensive chem ical defoliants, to prevent brush from sm othering newly planted trees; and the lambs from m icrosheep bring in useful incom e. Finally,

in Malaysia, the sheep population has doubled as Lim it is have begun grazing m icrosheep between the trees in lu b ber plantations.

Most pig breeds are too large to be considered m icrolivestock, but there are some whose m ature weight is less than 70 kg. The M exican cuino and the pygmy hog of Assam, both o f which are endangered, can weigh less than 10 kg, with a shoulder h eight of 25 cm . Pigs com plem ent other grazing livestock, and eat small roots, leafy trash, or bitter fruits that are not consum ed by hum ans or ruminants. Pigs work well in m ultiple-cropping schemes and are used in some places to help clear small plots by uprooting weeds, shrubs, and small trees. Vietnam ese potbellied pigs are often raised as indoor livestock in Vietnam ese cities. They do not get fleas, d on ’t shed hair, and, as a non-rooting breed , are easily house trained. Aldiough in recen t years they have b ecom e popular, if expensive, house pets in the U.S., their real potential lies in Third W orld villages and in urban livestock raising, where their non-rooting habits are desirable.

In Southeast Asia, pigs are often raised in conjunction with aquaculture, their m anure providing nutrition for edible aquatic plants as well as for fish. Barns are constructed on stilts over lakes, so that animal feces fall into the water. Floating aquatic duckweed (a very nutritious food) thrives on these wastes and can then be fed to the animals. At Louisiana State University, duckweed is being grown in dairy farm wastewater and substituted for alfalfa in dairy and pig feed. The potential for using duckweed to raise fish, poultry, and waterfowl exists in many parts o f the world.

In many parts of Southeast Asia, pig and o th er anim al m an u re is washed into lagoons stocked with fish such as carp or tilapia, and in which water spinach thrives. The fish can then be eaten by humans, and the water spinach fed to the animals. T he potential for the integration of fish, animal, and vegetable production is dius very great. Combined with the intelligent use of aquaculture, integrated an im al/plant systems can continually produce several crops in the same space, without the addition o f im ported fertilizers and foodstuffs.


Anarchism Sc Environmental Survival 103

Poultry

T he quintessential microlivestock, poultry are com m on th rou gh out the developing world in both rural and urban settings—and the small scavenger chicken is by far the most com m on kind of poultry. Bred for tem perate climates, North A m erican chickens are highly susceptible to heat, humidity and disease; their sm aller jungle counterparts, found in many parts of the Asian and African continents, could be crossbred with the N ordi A m erican chicken to develop new strains resistant to many diseases and pests. (O f the 50 or so breeds which were once com m on in the West, only two are now raised for m eat prod uction .) A com m on feature of most Third W orld villages, scavenger chickens are usually self-reliant, hardy birds capable of withstanding the abuses o f a harsh clim ate, minimal m anagem ent, and inadequate nutrition. They live largely on weed seeds, insects, and kitchen wastes that would otherwise be unused. Such free- ranging chickens are also well suited to urban farming, although their habit of scratching up the soil requires that they be kept out o f areas with young seedlings. Specific indigenous feeding practices vary considerably. In Ghana, for exam ple, farmers “cu ltu re” term ites for poultry consum ption by placing a moist piece o f cow dung (u n d er a tin) over a known term ite nest. The term ites burrow into the dung, and some can then be fed to the chickens each day. Because term ites can digest cellulose, this system converts waste vegetation into meat.

T hough they are a m ajor resource in Asia, domestic ducks are n ot yet com m on elsewhere. Most breeds do not require water in which to swim, adapt readily to a wide range of conditions (including small urban farms, where they produce excellent fertilizer), are m ore resistant to diseases, and are m ore adept foragers lhan chickens. Tropical varieties have much lower levels o f fat than do traditional farm ducks, and are am ong the most efficient o f all food producers. Apart from their eggs, which are larger and superior to those of chickens, their feathers and down are widely used as a filler for pillows. Ducks have a special fondness for mosquito and beetle larvae, grasshoppers, snails, slugs and crustaceans. Ducks clear fields of scattered grain, rice

paddies of burrowing crabs, and rem ove aquatic weeds and algae from small lakes, ponds, and canals. This not only improves co n ditions for aquaculture, but produces plum p ducks as well.

Although capable of wreaking considerable dam age to garden crops, muscovies will eat grass and can tolerate a m uch wide i die t than odier ducks. If used m ore widely, muscovies could con tribute m uch to poor people’s food supplies. They provide large quantities of prem ium quality m eat containing little fat, are prolific layers and attentive m others, and can tolerate extrem es of heat and cold. Muscovies are particularly fond of insects; they have been used for a long time to m anage fly problem s on Canadian farms. O ne duck placed in a cage containing 100 flies can eat 90 of them within 30 minutes. It takes flypaper, traps, and baits anywhere from 15 to 86 hours to suppress fly populations that m uch; further, such fly-catching devices are expensive and generally have to be kept away from livestock.

Although very well-suited to marshy areas, geese can thrive away from water, and they are the only dom estic fowl that can live and reproduce on a diet consisting solely of grass. They are, however, even m ore underutilized than ducks. They not only provide m eat, but their fat can be rendered into a long-lasting cooking oil, their large eggs are very good to eat, and their down is a fine natural insulating material. T heir long necks make them ad ept at gleaning weeds from hard-to-reach places, such as fence rows and ditches, that frustrate larger livestock. Because geese relish grasses and shun most broad-leafed plants, they have been used extensively in the U.S. to rid cotton fields of grassy weeds. In fact, geese could be used to weed nearly all broad-leafed crops— asparagus, potatoes, berry fruits, mint, grapes, beets, beans, hops, onions, and strawberries. In the past, geese were used in vineyards and fruit orchards to eat both weeds and fallen fruits, which could harbor diseases and parasites. The forest and flower industries could gain m uch from using these birds for weed control. Goslings can also be used to consum e the suckers on corn . Ten geese can clear as many weeds in the same am ount o f time as a farm er with a hoe; they also fertilize the fields, provide additional incom e, and work rain, shine, and overtime on m oonlit nights.

Similar to pheasants, Guinea fowl require little water (obtaining their moisture from dew), reproduce well in both cool and hot



conditions, and retain many of their wild ancestors’ survival characteristics. They grow quickly and produce twice as many eggs as do chickens. They arc excellent scavengers with a particular love for ant eggs, for which they will open ant hills. Apart from providing eggs and m eat, guinea fowl can be used to control insect pests on vegetable crops. In parts of Australia’s Queensland, many farm ers keep them to control grasshoppers and ticks in and arou n d cattle yards. The birds do no harm to gardens or crops because, unlike chickens, they d o n ’t scratch the ground. T h eir agitation upon sighting dogs, foxes, or hawks can save the lives o f o th er, less diligent poultry.

Farm ed pigeons are particularly prom ising as urban m icrolivestock because they require little space, thrive in cides, and forage over a very wide area. Dovecoats are a good source of garden m an u re and m eat; young pigeons (21 to 30 days old) are called squab, and yield a finely textured meat.

Although they require a pen because they d o n ’t stay close to h om e like o th er poultry, quail produce a staggering num ber of eggs, and their m eat is extrem ely low in fat and cholesterol. (Turkeys raised as free-ranging foragers likewise produce a very low-fat m eat.)

Many species o f wild birds in the rainforests o f Latin Am erica such as chachalcas, guans, curassows, unam ous, and trum peters could be dom esticated o r ran ch ed within the forest itself. These birds could m ake m uch-threatened forest land m ore valuable than land destroyed by felling trees for cow pastures. Finally, the potential o f M egapodes, the eggs of which are widely gathered in Papua New G uniea and Indonesia, should be further researched.

Rodents

Although raising rabbits takes m ore time and skill than raising chickens o r o th er scavengers, they are especially well adapted to households in which capital and fodder resources are limited, and they can do m uch to improve the diet of needy families. In theory, a single m ale and four females can produce as many as3 ,0 0 0 offspring a year, representing som e 1,450 kg of m eat—far m ore than one could get from a cow. Rabbits have m ore protein

and less fat and calories per gram than beef, pork, lam b, or chicken. In view of this, many countries are prom oting small scale pro-dution through advertising and school education program s. The long-haired A ngora yields a luxury fiber, as m uch as 1 kg per rabbit. The fur and leather of the m ore familiar breeds can likewise becom e a valuable source of incom e. Rabbit m an u re is an excellent fertilizer, containing high am ounts o f nitrogen, phosphorous, and potash, and is often m arketed in convenient dry pellet form. Unlike poultry m anure, rabbit droppings need not be com posted and can be immediately dug into the soil.

Rodents arc eaten in many countries. They are so popular, in fact, that many have becom e extinct, while others are on the verge of becom ing so. Indians of the Caribbean ate a n u m b er of indigenous rodents, one the size of a bear, causing several to becom e extinct just before the time of Columbus. T he cloud rat of the Phillipines, the m ara o f Argentina, the vizchaca o f South Am erica, and the hutias of the Caribbean have all been hunted to the verge of extinction. The dom estication of non-endangered species is already underway, with the raising o f capybara in Venezuela, paca in Panam a, the giant rat in Nigeria, and the grasscutter in Ghana. Because of their invasive potential, many of these rodents should not be farm ed outside their native range.

Non-native rodents can becom e true pests, as in New Zealand, where opposums were introduced into an environm ent with no predators, and indeed no mammals. At present, the opposum s are destroying New Zealand's forests by eating the greens off o f trees. The challenge in such a case is finding a way to usefully control the num ber of such animals, probably by som e com bination of predator introduction and farm in g/ran ch in g. A nother rod en t which has becom e a pest is the North Am erican grey squirrel, introduced into Europe; the challenge is finding ways to turn such pests into econom ic and ecological advantages.

The recently rediscovered “thinking rat” of the Solom on Islands (one of six rodents once widely eaten but now presum ed to be extinct), the kiore of Polynesia and New Zealand, the bamboo rat of Sum atra, and the giant New Guinea rat coidd all prove to be valuable food sources. Finally, the familiar pet guinea pig is perhaps the ultimate user-friendly microlivestock. It is quiet, odor free, and allowed to run loose in thousands of dwellings in



the Andes, where it has been raised and eaten for centuries. The low cost o f guinea pigs makes them available even to landless peasants. C onverdng kitchen scraps into m eat, 20 females and two males may produce enough m eat year-round to provide an adequate m eat diet for a family of six.

Microantelope and Microdeer

Although there is considerable exp erien ce, m ost notably in New Zealand, with rearing large species o f (introduced— in the case o f New Zealand) antelope and deer, their miniature cou nterp arts, standing between 20 and 40 centim eters, represent a virtually unknown resou rce in som e areas and are being hunted to exd n cd on in others. In all cases, these animals are adaptable to the harshest conditions, provide excellent m eat and pelt, eat forage that m ost o th er livestock find indigestible, and are resistant to many o f the diseases to which livestock such as catde are suscepdble. T he m untjac, a nadve o f Asia, has becom e wild in England and, unlike m any o th er alien species, is an asset rather than a nuisance to nadve plants and trees. The pudu, brocket, and huem ul are the three little-known types of South Am erican m icrod eer; with the excep tion of the huem ul, they could provide a valuable econ om ic resource.

Small antelope called duikers are an extrem ely popular food th rou gh out m uch o f Africa, from the densest rainforest to the driest savanna. Many species thrive in the savanna, rainforests, and secondary forests, and through illegal hundng are already m aking a significant contribution to the African larder. Over- hunting o f the once-abundant duikers, however, is leading to a significant decline in their num bers. Africa contains large expanses o f uninhabited land which do not produce any kind of com m ercial livestock; these would be idea places to introduce m icrolivestock such as duikers.

M icroantelope are widely hunted and eaten throughout Asia and Africa, and are currently being eliminated over broad areas o f their ranges; turning them into a sustainable and econom ical food sou rce would provide strong movivation for their conservation. T he best long-term solution for many species of wild

m icroantelope and deer is thus to organize theii husbandry through forest ranching, herding, or farming, d epending upon the proclivities of the animal in question.

Large Lizards and Iguanas

Lizards have been an im portant hum an food since prehistoric times, and are still com m only hunted in parts of Asia, Africa, Latin Am erican, and Australia. Iguanas offer prom ise as microlivestock because their m eat is popular th roughout m uch of Latin Am erica (fetching higher prices than pork or b eef), and they do not com pete for food, feeding on leaves, flowers, and fruits that are too high in the trees to be gathered by hum ans or livestock. As with m icroantelope and small rodents, indiscrim inate hunting and habitat destruction is leading to a worrying decline in their numbers. Pilot studies in Panam a and Costa Rica show that these animals are easily farm ed at the forest edge; on ce reared in captivity, they tend to stay near where they were raised if simple wooden shelters are provided. The sustainable exploitation of iguana would be a viable alternative to cutting down forests for farming or cattle rearing; raising iguanas could thus conserve tropical forest while providing people with m eat and incom e.

Bees

These insects are so com m on as microlivestock that little needs to be said about their potential, other than that they are uniquely suited to urban food production. The practice of rotating hives in farmers fields can greatly improve agricultural productivity by increasing pollination rates.


Miscellaneous Microlivestock

Often eaten by indigenous peoples, animals such as worms, edible insects, frogs, turtles, and bats could reap the benefit of natural habitat protection while providing the W estern world with


new, nutritional food sources, if we dropped our cultural taboos against consum ing them . In Thailand, for exam ple, where com munity forest land is being cut down to provide space for eucalyptus plantations (which dam age the soil and deprive the villagers not only o f valuable vegetables, fruit, and edible leaves, but also o f the frogs, ant eggs, beetles, and crickets upon which they d epend for nourishm ent during the dry season), great use is m ade of these non traditional animal food sources:

Silkworms, grasshoppers, ants’ eggs, tadpoles—the list of edibles that nature offers to northeastern peasants is endless. In the hot season, when fish are rare and ponds have turned into puddles, villagers spend most of their days in the fields or nearby forests looking for food. January is relatively kind to us as there are still fish in the swamp, and we can always find clams, water snails, tadpoles, and different sorts of frogs nearby. The tadpoles are usually prepared with chile into a spicy northeastern laab, mixed widi fermented fish or wrapped in banana leaves and roasted. Frogs are at their best in an om, sharing the bowl with ground rice, chili, and any available vegetables. But tadpoles and frogs have become increasingly rare because of the use of batteries to catch fish. They electrocute the fish, but kill off frogs and tadpoles as well. As for the birds, they return in February and stay unul May, but there have gradually been fewer birds over the years as die forests have disappeared. With the March heat, villagers have to turn to looking for ground lizards, edible insects, and beedes.If there is a brief shower of rain during this time, we set out in hordes looking for jeenoon beedes. They come out to eat the sprouting leaves. All we have to do is light fires under the trees and they just fall off onto the ground. In May, apart from grasshoppers and crickets, red ants and ants’ eggs are the delicacies of the month. Expert eyes will not miss an ants’ nest hidden in a mass of wilted leaves, glued together like a basket. When the nest is shaken with a long stick, worker ants and their eggs fall out and are caught in a bucket of water, but the hunter- gatherer dashes away in a flash to escape being bitten by them.1

In Australia, although kangaroo and em u m eat are now being m ade “legal” and becom ing m ore culturally acceptable am ong whites as food, many sm aller animals such as native lizards, snakes, and turtles are p rotected 011 conservation grounds from

being hunted or consum ed. The com m ercial farm ing of larger animals such as crocodiles and water buffalo has done m uch to conserve species and protect the environm ent. T h eie is no teason why these principles should not be applied to smaller animals. Many of the smaller wallabies, now on the verge o f extinction , were once widely consum ed by aboriginal peoples. I'he fencing off of land from feral cats, as well as intensive breeding program s, could provide both econom ic and conservation reasons for preserving Australia’s indigenous microlivestock.

Finally, giant clams can each produce over one million eggs at a time. Recent attempts to repopulate reefs in n orth ern Q ueensland with them were so successful that the navy had to be called in to shift the surplus youngsters to m ore rem ote reefs. Clams arc capable of delivering a staggering 18 tons of high protein m eat per hectare (a hectare equals 2.471 acres). Instead of genetically engineering larger and larger sheep and cattle, and killing millions of kangaroos in order to provide grass for such large domesticated livestock, Australians might be far better off looking at their own indigenous food sources and learning that small, indeed, may be truly beautiful.

Meat or Wheat?

Both medical and environmental science show us that the large scale production and consum ption of beef, pork, and m utton is unhealthy and unsustainable. But the simple switch from m eat to wheat (however valid from an ethical point of view) is not in itself very likely to do much to improve the fertility of the soil, conserve wilderness, or increase food production. Paddy fields release as m uch m ethane as do cows, and the large-scale m onocultural production of rice is little better for the environm ent than the large-scale monocultural production of sheep and cattle; both practices simplify ecosystems and discourage diversity by focusing upon an extrem ely narrow range of dom esticated plants and animals.

Humanity must learn to use wilderness and m arginal lands effectively, and stop using them for large-scale livestock rearing and monocultural agriculture. Enriched land polyculture, in



which edible and nutritious native fruits and tubers are encou raged , togeth er with the free-range ranching o f native wild species, represents by far the m ost ecologically rational approach to the use o f land in term s of both food production and the conservation o f wilderness diversity. Edible native fruits (m any of which have a m uch high er vitamin co n ten t than conventional ones) should be en cou raged through en rich ed land polyculture, and gath ered along with native animals in times o f high rainfall and seasonal ab un d an ce. Even in E u ro p e, the potential for en rich ed polyculture is very great. D uring W orld W ar II the shortage o f im ported fruits in England led people to collect rose hips, which are very high in vitamin C, from hedgerows. Lesser celandine is an o th er very com m on wayside flower which is rem arkably high in vitamin C; it was on ce collected to be taken on ships to prevent scurvy. Scores o f different types o f nuts, fungi, fruits, leaves, bulbs, and berries, m any o f which are highly nutridous and con sum ed by a g reat variety o f animals, were on ce collected from E u rop ean and A m erican woodlands. If the cultivation o r p rotection o f edible plants could be en cou raged as p art o f the reforestation and revegetation of m eadow lands, this would n ot only provide food for gam e animals and birds, but w holesom e m eat and fruits for us as well.

E xclu d in g anim al husbandry from food production oversimplifies the ecosystem and ignores the co-evolution o f plant and anim al life. In alm ost any region, modified forms o f anim al husbandry can coexist with fruit, grain, and vegetable production. T he intelligent com bination o f these, in small-scale, integrated, and w ell-m anaged a n im al/p lan t systems, is often the only effective way to increase soil fertility and elim inate the use o f harm ful chem icals used for pest and weed control. Many animals consum e feeds that can n o t be eaten by hum ans; and the growing o f these anim al foods does n ot conflict with vegetable and fruit production. In m any cases, animals can be used to target insects and weeds w'hich inhibit agricultural success. Animal m anure is a necessary p art o f any stable ecosystem ; clearly, the range o f useful products that can be obtained from animals is not restricted to the m eat which they p rod uce.

T o insist upon the ethical correctn ess o f vegetarianism or veganism is one thing; to claim that such practices, if universally

adopted, would automatically improve the environm ent and increase food production is misleading. Large scale p roduction of a very few breeds of very large m eat-producing animals, fed upon monoculturally produced grassland, grain, or fodder, is a sickly product of industrial capitalism. Cutting down rainforest to grow grass to feed catde to make ham burgers for consum ers in rich countries is absurd and destructive, but diere are a thousand ways to produce meat, grains, fruit, and vegetables in harm ony with one another, at the same time enhancing the health o f the land and soil upon which we all depend. It is thus not m eat-eating per se, but the large scale m onoproduction of both animals and grains (especially those that are fit for hum an consum ption) that is the ecological culprit.


1. Behind, the Smile: Voices o f Thailand, by Sansitsuda Ekachai. Bangkok: Thai Development Support Committee, 1991, pp. 41-43.

Wilderness and The Human Community

W ill we allow ou r children to stare in awe at a free eagle hovering over a beautiful, unspoiled m ountainside? O r will we only allow them a last-chance glance at a few m iserable specim ens in wire cages? W hat is the anarchist vision for the health and contin u in g evolution o f life on E arth in wilderness areas; and what o f the species that such areas sustain?

T he Fren ch a n arch ist/g eo g rap h er Elisee Reclus, writing over a century ago, clearly saw the n eed to preserve the great wilderness areas o f the E arth from obliteration by industrial capitalism. T he preservation and expansion o f wilderness was necessary if hum anity was n ot to fall into decline. T he “wilderness exp erien ce” was, for Reclus, an essential part o f childhood; without it, adults’ appreciation o f life would be stunted:

Those who traverse the Pyrenees, the Alps, or the Himalayas, or even the high cliffs along the seashore, those who plunge into the depths of the virgin forest or look down into a volcanic crater, learn, while looking at these magnificent sights, how to appreciate the true beauty of less striking scenery, and when they have the power of modifying it they will not fail to respect its peculiar features. We must therefore wish every success to that noble passion which impels so many men, and, we must add, the best among men, to penetrate into virgin forests, to U'averse seashores and mountain gorges, and to examine nature in all the regions of die globe where she has preserved her primitive beauty. It is now felt that, unless we wish to subside into intellectual and moral weakness, it is necessary that the vulgarity of so many ugly and commonplace things, in which narrow-minded people think that they discern the evidence of modern civilization, should be counterbalanced at any cost by the contemplation of the

m agn ificen t scen ery o f th e earth . It is necessary that th e d iie c t study o f n atu re and th e co n sid era tio n o f its p h e n o m e n a sh ou ld b e co m e o n e o f th e prin cip al e lem e n ts o f ed u ca tio n fo r every

cultivated m an; . . .'

Although Reclus goes on to talk of “beautifying the surface of the Earth and . . . making it that pleasant garden, d ream t of by the poets of all the ages,” a careful reading of his work reveals that he was not calling for the creation of a carefully bioengineered planet in which the E arth ’s wilderness is transform ed into a tame utopia. He was calling for, rather, a world which held forests enough for encounters with Blake’s “tyger," but which also held a place for civilization’s gently rolling gardens and fields, a place for both Shelley’s “skylark” and Hopkins’ “brinded cow."

But today, many assert that hum an civilization is incom patible with a clean environm ent, and some extrem e critics assert that hum an civilization is inevitably lethal to the environm ent. Do we face a choice between the free and spontaneous evolution of wilderness life or the manipulation and partial (or com p lete) destruction of our birthplace? Must we allow the biosphere to remain unfettered by human purpose and design, or must we turn the wilderness into a giant garden, engineered to ou r own requirem ents? While either choice is infinitely preferable to destroying 99% of the E arth ’s biological inheritance in the nam e of capital and state, neither is a viable solution.

Two facts are obvious: first, the environm ent needs p rotection , especially where it is most threatened; second, hum anity is ju st one am ong many millions of species living and evolving upon this planet. It is necessary to preserve those areas which have been left for the most part undisturbed by hum an agro-industrial activity. W ithout wilderness, life’s ability to spontaneously evolve will be crippled, and we cannot allow this to happen.

The preservation and expansion of wilderness can n ot be accomplished without fundam ental changes in the civic life of humanity. We are burning the environm ental candle at both ends—the city and developers' bulldozers at one end, cattle and barbed wire at the other.

We must cease regarding wilderness and rural areas as disposable econom ic resources. The idea that “backpackers’

114 Wilderness and the Human Community

parks," wildlife refuges, and national parks (the latter usually located on land which was n ot con sid ered financially viable for developm ent) are adequate wilderness areas for the evolution of the E a rth ’s m any lifeform s strikes m ost environm entalists as biologically naive, if not dow nright ludicrous. W ilderness should lap at the fringes of ou r cities and towns—large native birds and animals should live right th ere , occasionally swooping down or w andering into ou r suburban gardens. Substantial areas o f every ecological region n eed to be given over to wilderness, to the free and sp ontaneou s evolution o f the b iosphere—and n ot ju st to hum ans and their pathetic handful o f d om esd c anim als and plants. This entails n ot ju st “conserving” small “p ock ets,” but actively exp an d in g the am ou n t o f wilderness in each ecological region. In m any areas, this will probably involve the rem oval o f unnecessary roads an d in ap propriate satellite suburbs as p art of the purposeful d econstru ction and recon stru ction o f o u r urban an d rural space.

B ut the recon stru ction o f urban and rural life acco rd in g to ecological guidelines can n o t be ethically accom p lished via dictates from above. People can n o t be forceably rem oved from their houses or deprived o f their roads and local services by governm ental forces, as the Pol Pot regim e did in C am bodia with horrifying results. T he gran d work o f recon stru ction can only be accom plished throu gh co n certed education and increased awareness o f the goal o f cooperative bio-regional com m unities. Practical interim solutions include the establishm ent o f wildlife corrid ors between existing n atu re reserves and, m ore practically, the en h an cem en t o f “buffer zones” arou n d existing parks in o rd er to preserve their cen tral and an cien t cores. In tim e, even these m inim al steps would p rod u ce significant areas o f wilderness in every ecological region on E arth .

Predators

Until recently, pred ators such as tigers, sharks, bears, and wolves were viewed as h u m an k in d ’s enem ies. T he dram atically dangerous and ferocious beasts o f the adventure story were


tracked down and shot wherever they were found. Since the advent of the stone axe and the flint-tipped spear, however, such animals have ceased being m uch of a threat to hum an populations. Nevertheless, a fear of predators has given force to the irrational wish to tame and destroy the wilderness that shelters

them.Fortunately, a m ore rational approach that com bines fear and

respect for wildlife is em erging. (O f course, we should not be naive about how dangerous wildlife really is.) Australia’s attitude toward the crocodile and the shark is at last moving away from a “shoot and kill” mentality to one of respect and curiosity. Since the com m ercial hunting of crocodile stopped (at the brink of extinction) in Australia’s N orthern Territory many years ago, people have gradually com e to respect crocodile w arning signs by waterholes and have learned to swim where it is safe. On Q ueensland’s Gold Coast, enthusiasts are at this very m om en t capturing and then moving sharks from an inland canal system and returning them to the ocean , instead o f indiscriminately killing them every time som eone is hurt or killed.

Europe— A Land Without Wilderness

In most of Europe, wilderness preservation does n ot even present itself as an issue. In G reat Britain, for exam ple, the battle is not over wilderness but over ancient woodlands and meadows. The wilderness disappeared there 2 ,000 years ago, and 95% o f all the original wetlands have been drained. In England, the last wolf was killed around 1600, and several thousand years before that the m am m oth and the bear disappeared. The Scottish highlands still have room enough for a few bears and wolves, and the reconstruction of wilderness might, in som e cases, allow the réintroduction o f some of these animals into England. The wilderness ethic currently so fashionable within som e Australian and Am erican radical environm ental circles has little m eaning, then, for W estern Europeans, with the possible exception o f those living on the Iberian Peninsula.



Restoration of Wilderness

In advocating the restoration of the wilderness, we should be careful not to reject the capacity for rational human behaviors. Som e extrem e conservationists believe that it would be in our species’ and ou r p lan et’s interest to prevent all hum an access to existing national parks and wilderness areas. Those holding this belief ignore the value of positive, rational hum an intervention. P rior to E uropean colonization, for exam ple, the Australian aborigines m anaged extensive areas of wilderness and helped preserve thousands of species of small marsupials through selectively b urning the bush. The cessation of rational aboriginal land m an agem en t with the advent of European settlem ent was a large factor in the early extinction of many small marsupials. In many areas o f the globe, hum anity will have to consciously intervene in o rd er to ensure the preservation of wilderness—and this work m ore often than not will necessarily involve large num bers o f people. The attem pt to prevent access to wilderness dirough authoritarian controls is uncalled for and unworkable. H um anity can n o t and must not be cut off from nature.

Even that which we now denote as wilderness has in most cases been m anipulated and transform ed by the activities of our ancestors, and as long as hum anity rem ains on this planet, the fate o f wilderness areas (as well as our own) is intimately dependent upon how we individually and collectively relate to them. Inactivity is n ot a serious option on a living and constantly evolving planet. Those parts of the world designated as wilderness m ust be exp and ed , not placed off limits to all but a handful of park officials. However, cu rren t hum an activities within wilderness areas, from crass tourism to vastly inappropriate techno-fixes (such as the New Zealand Park Authority’s sprinkling of vast tracts o f native bush with insecticide pellets that they presume only possum s will eat) are clearly misdirected. Rather, the people of an ecological region must work together to ensure the restoration of its natural ecosystems. Restoration will be slow, arduous, and labor intensive—let no eco crat persuade you otherwise. Free from the stress o f capitalist overproduction and of needless forms of labor,

workers m ore often than not will have the time to enjoy clean air and forests while simultaneously engaging in activities that lead to the expansion and renewal of essential natural resources.

The Oceans and Atmosphere

The boundary between land and sea is not simply a “fen ce” between different regions; it constitutes, rather, an ecosystem , in fact a form of wilderness, in its own right. In som e places the shallows stretch for miles out to sea, with m angrove swamps covering huge areas of the world s coastline. Coral reefs, island chains, bays, inlets, and deltas make for unique coastal environments in which the distinction between land and sea becomes almost meaningless. W hole classes o f plants and anim als are especially adapted to these areas, where life enjoys the rich habitats accorded by the mixing of land and water. It is the province of seals, gulls, crabs—and hum ans. The p resen ce o f land and ocean together creates, as it were, a doubling o f the potential for life. Indeed, the beach is where all terrestrial life b egan, as creatures moved from sea to land many hundreds o f millions of years ago.

Nonetheless, for many people the ocean represents a co m pletely alien world. Although hum ans have always p rospered and evolved on the world’s beaches, beyond coastal waters the ocean becomes a place of danger, where hum ans, unless safely aboard some vessel, are ill-equipped to survive m ore than a few hours. Our fear of drowning and of the unknown has for cen tu ries led us to invent ghasdy sea monsters capable of devouring a ship in a m atter of seconds. Until the subm arine and the underw ater cam era, exactly what lay at the bottom of the ocean was m ore of a mystery to our species than what lies in outer space—at least one can see the stars! Novelists, dream ers, and visionaries o f the past imagined huge undersea cities built upon the ocean floor, m uch as m odern science fiction depicts alien civilizations upon marvelous planets in distant galaxies. The deep sea creatures recently filmed by underwater photographers appear as alien to us as any space monsters dream ed up by the film industry. Thus, although the boundary between Earth and space is indeed “the



final fro n tier,” the bord er between land and sea is undoubtedly the last frontier that exists h ere on Earth.

O cean ograp h y and m arine ecology are showing us that the oceans are not simply great expanses of water, but that they consist o f a diverse group o f oceanographic regions. Am ong other factors, volcanic activity, peculiar currents, and vast differences in depth, fertility, and tem perature have com pounded to make a patchwork of distinct aquatic regions and subregions every bit as diverse as the terrestrial ones with which we are familiar.

T he fact that so many of the E arth ’s bioregions are uninhabitable (for ou r species) offers some problems for social anarchists. T he bioregional approach to the environm ental crisis is quite rightly depen d en t upon the notion of “re-inhabiting" o n e ’s region—the argu m en t is that only if people identify deeply with the regions in which they live will global bioregional harm ony be attainable. The question arises, how is such harm ony to be achieved when so little of the E arth ’s surface is or has been inhabitable for us?

T he largest unihabitable land area is A ntarctica, which has recently b ecom e the subject of international debate. Although the w orld’s governm ental leaders eventually decided to adopt a “wait and see” policy toward the proposed mining and “econom ic d evelopm ent” o f the E a rth ’s last great terrestrial wilderness, they dismissed out of hand the inherently reasonable idea put forward by G reenp eace that A ntarctica be declared a “world park.” A n tarctica’s adjoining ice sheets in some ways make it a midpoint between land and ocean , and though it has never had a resident hum an population, it is a haven for m uch of the world's best- loved m arine life. It is unfortunately, however, one of the most fragile environm ents on our planet. Antarctica needs humans like Australia needs rabbits, and the idea that humanity should consider it a global park is an eminently sound proposal.

I believe that if we are going to achieve global environmental harm ony, it is necessary to extend G reenpeace’s proposal for A ntarctica to include all the E arth ’s great oceans. We should designate all the oceans as world parks—over which no individual or hum an nation can lay any legitimate claim whatsoever, and in which we have absolutely no right to interfere. This is not an

extrem e position; the extent of the dam age that hum anity has inflicted upon the world’s oceans in rendering whole classes of marine life near extinction has yet to be properly addressed. The world’s oceans, rather than being the province o f n uclear submarines, driftnets, and oil tankers, m ust b ecom e a new sphere of human social and ecological cooperation. T he forth com in g global federation of terrestrial bioregions must begin its work by declaring die oceans world aquatic reserves, whose ecological integrity must be preserved.

Although we cannot “inhabit” ocean regions, ou r p ercep tion of and interaction with oceans must ch ange from on e of indifference and brute exploitation to one o f care and respect. At present we barely understand the enorm ous potential, dynam ic complexity, and im mense regional diversity of the vast expanses of water we call oceans. Instead of regarding the ocean s as irritating obstacles to hum an m ovem ent—expanses o f w ater to be crossed or ruthlessly harvested for food—we are at last beginning to overcom e the “frontier mentality” of pillage and waste, and starting to think constructively and responsibly about the E a rth ’s aquatic inheritance. Rather than regarding blue whales as hundreds of tons of floating m eat, we are instead taking ou r first tentative steps toward com m unication with these mighty creatures. The dolphins that play with people at Monkey Mia on W estern Australia’s coast show us that our efforts to co o p erate and com m unicate with m arine life are likely to be both rew arding and reciprocal.

The quest for wilderness preservation and global ecological harmony does not end with respecting the oceans. They may be the final frontier” on Earth , but there rem ains an even less- explored frontier—that of the atm osphere between E arth and space. Like all boundaries in nature, the atm osphere is not a simple, clear-cut boundary; rather, it is com posed of many layers, all of which play vital and com plem entary life-preserving functions. Like the oceans, the health, stability, and purity o f the atm osphere is essential to planetary homeostasis. In turn, both land and sea are profoundly affected by the slightest ch ange in the composition of gasses in the atm osphere, as can be seen in the em erging and horrifying details about the green h ouse effect and ozone depletion. Clearly, not only must the terrestrial



federation of bioregions make peace with E arth ’s aquatic regions, but togeth er they must make peace with the atm osphere.

Although the clouds, tree tops, and m ountain summits in some senses rep resen t the boundary between the biological and non- biological, like all things in nature they are deeply interd epen d en t. It is in prom oting the harm onious interactions am ong the terrestrial, aquatic, and aerial regions of the Earth—both wilderness and nonwilderness regions—that we will restore the health and vigor o f the global organism .

1. L a Terre, by Elisee Reclus, translated by B. Woodward, 1873 .

Anarchism and Community Self-Defense

I n the past, when people depended upon their local region for provision of their basic necessities, defense of that region was synonymous with self-defense. The need to protest and p rotect not in the nam e of this or that “ism," but in o rd er to save precious local ecosystems—is again em erging as a fundam ental individual and comm unity necessity. The fight to “save the earth" begins at hom e, where all can participate in local social and environmental reconstruction. Since it transcends ideology, this struggle can potentially unite young and old, women and m en, black and white. This developm ent joins com m unity consciousness with self-determination.

The efforts of suburbanites to save a local park and the struggle of the native peoples of Sarawak to save their forests are both attempts by local inhabitants to assert control over their environments. Anarchists simply ask people to move beyond sporadic community actions and instead to assert the right to regional self- determ ination—leading ultimately to a global federation of ecoregionally integrated communities.

Self-defense is considered a fundam ental individual right in ou r European dem ocratic tradition. In a situation in which people have been intimately dependent upon the sam e forest for thousands of years, eco-defense becom es self-defense. W ithout the forests and kinspeople upon which they depend, indigenous people are individually defenseless. It is for these reasons that natives, arm ed only with arrows or spears, defend their territory

to the death. Europeans, by contrast, are stuck like flies in a spider web paralyzed little individualists confined in little brick boxes, feeling powerless to protect the environm ent around us from despoliation.


It is only when local people com e together to defend their environm ent against the excesses of corp orate greed that change can com e about. Since it has been prom oting the ideal of local self-determ ination for m ore than two centuries, anarchism contains the seeds of the contem pory G reen idea of eco-defense. N ot only does it assert the absolute right of people to defend their locality from external interference, it also encourages like- m inded people in various com m unities and regions to federate with one an oth er to set up their own nongovernm ental and noncapitalist forms o f organization.

But in the m egalopolis, where the majority o f people now live, die population has long since been uprooted from the native lands o f its forebears; city dwellers no longer even dream of engaging in p rotracted land-based cam paigns against occupying arm ies. M odern city dwellers feel lucky if they own their own houses or trade tools; and they can no longer fall back upon an inum ate knowledge o f the terrain for collective self-defense—the loss o f a form idable skill, even in these days of military satellites and heat-seeking missiles.

U p rooted from their native soils and all too frequendy alienated from the ecology of the surrounding countryside, the people o f the city can becom e helpless victims of military aggression. C rou ching like rats in cellars and subway stations, their only salvation is “m edia attention” and help from outside. In the past, before the developm ent of the nation state, when towns were ind epen d en t, the city defended itself as a city, defined by its encircling defensive walls. Its citizens were intimately acquainted with the ecology and rural lifestyles of the surrounding countryside, and rural people looked to the city for protection from military adventurers, rogue kings, and other scoundrels. But today, the walls of the medieval city of Dubrovnik are just so many useless old stones in the ethnic violence currendy plaguing the Balkans nation states.

Military Madness

T he m od ern military has the capability to launch an all-out attack upon the environm ent any time it chooses to do so. It need no longer limit itself to fighting other armies, or to

massacring civilians; rather, it can destroy the organic and inorganic infrastructure o f an entire regio n -leavin g the region s people (along with the plants and animals) hapless victims, like sea birds in an oil slick. The most famous recen t exam ple is that of Saddam Hussein, a man driven insane by the corrup ting influence of near-absolute military power, who attem pted to destroy the ecology of the Kuwaiti desert by blowing up its many oil wells.

In South Vietnam, the U.S. military, through chem ical defoliation of vast tracts of forest, attem pted to destroy the ecology of an entire biological region in its pursuit o f military victory. This attem pt to defoliate and toxify an entire forest ecosystem was unprecedented. The defoliation of huge areas of Vietnam ’s forests was, to the m egalom aniacal U.S. governm ent, like selectively weed-killing a small co rn er of com m unist nettles behind the backyard shed. Realizing that the long-term results o f military campaigns on foreign terrain are far from certain , the U.S. military invested in the developm ent of weapons o f mass destruction which would not only destroy “the people" in one decisive attack, but would also destroy their environm ent for generations to com e.

Capitalist Madness

Such occurrences are almost trivial com pared to the routine, unceasing destruction of nature under state-sponsored capitalism, lo g g ers cut trees 24 hours a day in som e forests o f Southeast Asia, using enorm ous mobile spotlights at night. Thus, when the military arm of the state-capitalist ord er is not destroying regional ecologies, the anti-social, profit-at-any-price econ om ic arm of capitalism is doing the same thing, but m ore slowly. Anarchists oppose both the military state and the capitalist system, advocating the developm ent of regional and interregional eco- defense networks.

Eco-defense differs from both military offense and defense; its thrust is essentially peaceful and preemptive. T he eco-defense of a region involves peaceful, regenerative, and constructive activities, the aim of which is to defend the beauty and natural

124 Anarchism and Community Self-Defense


ecology o f neigh borhood and bioregion. These activities include the establishm ent of local seed banks to preserve rare and th reaten ed species, the regeneration of native bush lands, and o th er such benign behaviors. Local skills exchange networks, G reen action alliances, and a host o f oth er G reen organizations all p ractice eco-defense.

At som e point, however, force will be m et by force; the state is never afraid to use the police and the army to impose its will against the wishes o f people in revolt. Eco-defense implies attacking the state/cap italist system from within as well as from without. While it is workers who actually build the bulldozers and m achines o f war, they/w e ultimately have the least to gain from the resulting dam age. From a capitalist standpoint, workers are the weakest link in the chain o f the military-industrial com plex. G reens, workers, and G reen workers must join together to collectively defend the ecology (and ultimately the econom y) of the regions in which they work and live. O ne urgent task facing eco-anarchists is to convince our fellow workers that preservation o f the environm ent is in th e ir /o u r best econom ic interests. A good exam ple o f such an effort is the cu rren t IW W /Earth First! educational and organizing cam paign am ong timber industry workers in N orth ern California.

The Role of the State

For centuries, nation states have forcibly relocated people when they d eem ed such rem oval necessary to their interests. Examples ran ge from the m ovem ent of entire nations by Stalin in the early 20th century Soviet em pire, to the British declaration of Terra Nulla in con qu ered lands (that is, aboriginals did not exist or were not hum an, and were rather a “lower” species of hom inid!) T he flesh and blood results o f such deliberate dislocations are people cram m ed into labor cam ps, missions, and refugee stations— deprived o f their land and tools, or dragged as children from their parents in ord er to be taught to be good little citizens.

T h ro u g h o u t its history, the state has attem pted to eradicate regional differences and de-territorialize entire nations, reducing everyone to cogs in a huge, colorless, eventually industrial

m egam achine. And this de-territorialization of the people by the state is becom ing m ore com plete every day. T he aim is to produce an urbanized robot with no organic con nection to the land upon which s /h e lives. A hum an who is little m ore than a social security num ber adrift in a sea of social anom ie is incapable of effectively resisting the amassed power of capital and state.

The governm ent knows that people must be taught to displace their inborn sense o f connection to their kin and their h om e region. Indoctrination of nationalist beliefs and identities is therefore one of the main purposes of com pulsory state education — to teach people that they are French rather than Breton or Basque, and English rather than Cornish or a N orthcum ber- lander. In England, the destruction of regional languages through the enforced teaching of Latin or the Q u een ’s English buttressed the Act of Enclosure (confiscation by the state o f the English “com m on lands”). Forced from the high meadows of Cum berland to work in the cotton mills of Lancashire, the u prooted and exploited suffered die double humiliation of working 14 hours a day for paltry wages and of watching their children perish from malnutrition and disease. In response to this situation—and with the spectre of the Paris Com m une before its eyes—the English state saw fit in the Education Act of 1871 to m andate that all children under its control go to school, where they would learn that they were “English” and must curtsey to the Q ueen. T he Basques, Bretons, Catalans, and Welsh peoples were, for m odern European states, unwelcome rem inders of the dynam ic pre- Roman regionalist order. The languages and cultures of these peoples have been either directly outlawed or indirecUy destroyed through compulsory (m is)education and saturation-level exposure to mass media.

Despite the sad legacy of hundreds of years of Rom an imperialism, the Welsh, Basques, and Bretons survived, and it is their dogged ability to resist state military and cultural conquest which is of real interest here. Social anarchists argue that such strong regionalist sentiments should now be taken out of the context ol petty nationalism and transferred to a non-nationalist, universal concept of self-defense of o n e ’s local region from suite encroachm ent. The fight of native peoples throughout the newly industrializing world is only the front line in the historic battle



against the u prooting of hum anity by statism /capitalism . While we m ust do what we can to assist indigenous people around the world, we must also strengthen the rearguard, defending the regional integrity o f such h om e places as rem ain in the“developed” world.

Eco-Offense

All anarchists desire an end to war, but anarcho-pacifists insist upon strict ad h eren ce to pacifism, in ord er not to contam inate peaceful ends with the violent m eans that som e argue will be required to overthrow large, centralized military states. Some anarchists thus reject eco-offensive behavior (that is, acts that may involve destruction or sabotage, though with no threat to hum an life or lim b). This nonviolent approach shows a com m itm ent to p eace, and is m orally defensible.

Som e eco-offensive actions undertaken by organizations such as G reen p eace—especially those involving courageous, nondestructive stunts—have proven rem arkably effective in winning over large cross-sections o f the com m unity to g reen er ways of thinking. This may be partly due to the fact that the real targets of G reenp eace’s actions are the mass m edia, not the whalers in the n ext boat. A century ago, an altercation between two boats at sea would have been the basis for som e drunken sailor’s yarn. But everybody in the world today is able to enjoy real-life dram a on the high seas from the com fort o f their own living room . The m edia are indeed a circus, and a m odern-day “pirate” story is simply too m uch for them to resist; G reen p eace ’s nonviolent eco-offensive stunts are as m uch global m edia events as were the environmental destruction o f the Kuwaiti desert in the Gulf W ar, and the Exxon Valdez disaster in Alaska.

Sabotage

Beyond publicity stunts and imaginative but essentially peaceful protests, we m ust consider the subject of sabotage. Eco-sabotage involves the deactivation of bulldozers, the blocking of logging roads, e tc ., in an effort to slow down the depradations of the s ta te /co rp o ra te m achine and to rem ind workers in harmful occu

pations that others in their com m unity do not appiovt of tlnii activities. On the surface, sabotage appears to be m ore offensive than defensive, but the seemingly offensive nature o f com m and o- type attacks on environmentally dangerous industries can be justified as defense of the Earth. The aim of the eco-offensive is not military gain or individual profit, but rathet the general defense of wilderness and nature for the benefit of all.

Sometimes, however, sabotage turns nasty and violence results— almost always initiated by representatives o f the state or co rp o ra tions. Most people are aware of the eco-destruction being wrought all around them , and largely understand the basic difference between acting in o n e’s own interest and acting for the good of the planet. They generally, and quite rightly, regard saboteurs as idealists, not as com m on crim inals or vandals. T he long jail terms m eted out to the Vancouver Five by the Canadian governm ent, the bombing of the Rainbow W arrior by the Fren ch secret service, the car bom bing of IW W /E arth First! activists Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney by tim ber com pany goons, and the entrapm ent of Earth First! founder Dave Forem an by the FBI, coupled with the entrapm ent and im prisonm ent o f four o f his colleagues, all clearly testify to the fact that, when it feels threatened, the state/capitalist ord er employs all m eans—fair or foul, legal or illegal—against its “enem y.”

W hatever philosophical problems we may have with justifying attacks upon environmentally ruinous projects, those qualms do not alter the fact that state/capitalist enterprises seriously dam age the processes of life and are therefore profoundly unethical. T he perpetrators of environm ental outrages have the support of police, armies, prisons, and the advantage of superior com m un ication systems—a colossal arsenal of organized military violence. It is not my place to say whether the eco-defensive cam paign to Save the Earth should involve large-scale engagem ents with the

forces of state and capital. W ar is war, an all-out opposition of force by force; it usually occurs when all possibility o f peaceful reconciliation has vanished, when resolution can only take place (or so it seems) through the victory of one side or the oth er. Anarchists have always hoped that consciousness building and dialogue am ong the workers of the world would result in organization of worldwide opposition to the production o f arm s,



thereby averting the possibility of m ore violence and war. Unfortunately, this has not happened. In both World Wars I and II, workers were happy to produce arm am ents for the state in an international orgy of nationalistic slaughter. The critical question is w hether hum anity will b ecom e aware of the life potential of a peaceful federation o f nonhierarchical eco-com m unides soon enough to avoid m ore widescale violence.

Timber Wars

Perhaps the m ost im portant cu rren t exam ple of eco-defense is the rVVW/'Earth First! cam paign to save N orthern California’s redwoods. It’s thus worthwhile to consider the lessons to be drawn from that cam paign, and a good jum ping off point is the recen t book, Timber Wars, by IWVV/Earth First! activist Judi Bari.

Ju d i Bari was born in the U.S. in 1949. She becam e a student activist during the Vietnam W ar years before dropping out of college. She worked as an industrial worker for the next 20 years, and becam e involved in the union m ovem ent. She helped to organize two strikes—one of 17 ,000 grocery clerks in the Maryland-D.C.-Virginia area, and the oth er a successful wildcat strike against the U.S. Postal Service at the W ashington, D.C. Bulk Mail C enter. In 1979 she moved to California, and a decade later b ecam e involved with Earth First! Team ing up with h er friend Darryl C herney, she began to organize opposition to the destruction o f the few rem aining pockets of ancient redwood forests in N orth ern California. After one assassination attem pt and n um erou s death threats, Bari was nearly killed in a car bom bing in 1990 that left h er crippled for life. The FBI never seriously investigated the bom bing; instead, they attem pted to fram e Ju d i and Darryl, claim ing that they had been victims of their own bom b, an absurd and slanderous claim that was quickly discredited by available evidence.

T h e assassination attem pt did not, however, stop the Redwood S u m m er eco-defense cam paign that Bari had been organizing. O u trage over the bom bing encouraged new people to becom e involved; and IW W /E arth First! actions and organizing campaigns con tin u e in B ari’s h om e area of M endocino County to this day.


Redwoods and Rednecks

All is well neither for the once-mighty redwoods of California n or for tim ber industry workers; and things are unlikely to gc t m uch better in the near future. The timber industry has a policy of cutting every tree m ore than a foot tiiick, and redwoods do not even begin to seed until they are about 130 years old. The timber industry has brought in new machines which can literally pluck small trees out of the ground, and it’s even hatched a plan to extract the few rem aining 1000-year-old trees out of gorges with helicopters. The redwood ecosystem has now alm ost vanished. W hat will be left for the i n h a b i t a n t s of logging com m unities when the timber com panies inevitably leave? The residents of these com m unities, although aware of their predicam ent, continue to scram ble to rem ain wage slaves just a little bit longer.

If the loggers and mill workers had organized an effective union, they might have been able to insist on a sustainable harvesting plan. Sadly, this didn’t happen—through no fault of Bari and her fellow organizers. The real losers in this battle were timber industry workers, who were simply unable to work in solidarity with one another. In the words of one o f them:

“T h e w orkers are up against the wall— but th ey ’re n o t org an ized .I ’ve th o u g h t fo r years that th e re should be a tim b e r w orkers u n ion . I t ’s hard becau se th e r e ’s so m any levels o f em p lo y m en t. T h e r e ’s a guy o u t th ere w orking in the w oods, th e r e ’s a guy hau lin g logs to th e m ill, th e r e ’s a lo t involved. B u t w ithout organ izatio n , well what g o o d ’s it g o in g to d o m e to qu it w hen J o e Blow down the road is goin g to go ahead and take my jo b ? ”

In the past, the lumber com panies employed im m igrant crews who were always afraid of having to go back to som ething w orse,”

and whose strikes “were crushed with a level of violence th at’s hard even to com prehend." Radical unionism in tim ber country simply never re-established itself after being obliterated during the 1920s by the com bined forces of capital and state. Lack of unions led to very bad wages and working conditions—tim ber workers lived in hell while they helped to destroy a paradise; but the prospect ol im mediate unem ploym ent was even worse.


So, the tim ber com panies know that the workers will submit to alm ost anything. T he mills are run by m ean, petty dictators who disregard industrial safety in o rd er to m eet production quotas, and conditions in the woods are no better. Loggers are often crushed or poisoned by chem icals:

Logging is the most dangerous job in the U.S., according to the Labor Department. The death rate among loggers is 129 per100,000 employees, compared with 37.5 for miners. . . . In 1986 the companies knowingly sprayed chemicals over an area where a logging crew was working, poisoning 12 to 15 people. The loggers’ skin turned beet red, they had severe headaches, diarrhea and nausea, one man threw up blood and another man’s wife had a miscarriage after handling his clothes. The company maintained that the loggers just had the flu . . . and threatened them with a lawsuit if they caused any more trouble.

If life is bad in the woods, it’s ju st as bad in the mills:

The work rules are designed to turn you into an automaton. . . . You have to be at your work station ready to go when the start-up whisde blows, or you can be written up for lateness. Three white slips in a year and you're fired. . . . Amid constant noise and visible sawdust in the air . . . whole logs run through a two-yard-tall band saw. The off-bearer stands a few feet from these saws and uses a hook to grab the slices of log. There are no guards on the sawblades, just exposed, high speed, spinning teeth. The off-bearer must wear a face shield to protect himself from flying knots or metal debris from the logs, but that’s not always enough to prevent injury. Because the knots are few and far between, the bearer is not always alert. It can run cool for a week or a month, then wham!—something pulls the saw off.

B ecause they’ve generally failed to organize, loggers and mill- w orkers p erform these terrible job s for minimal wages. Constant speed ups and in creased production quotas make the work increasingly d angerous. By con tractin g jobs ou t to old employees as private co n tracto rs , the tim ber com panies further reduce the possiblity o f industrial organization am on g workers. In the words o f on e eq uipm ent op erator:

In the wintertime when logging was not going on my boss subletted me and my piece of equipment lo do some highway work. 1 was getting $8.50 an hour lo run my piece of equipment, and there was an 18 year old girl that was standing there holding the flag all day, and she was getting $22.50 an hour. [Why?] She is in a union!"

The reasons for such miserable conditions are not that many of the workers do not understand what’s going on, n or that Bari and oth er agitators did not try to get loggers to organize to save their jobs and the environm ent. Raiher, ab h orren t conditions pit workers against each oth er over jobs, and local law en forcem en t agencies make sure that attempts to unionize loggers are ru th lessly suppressed. As well, the tim ber com panies and AFL-CIO bureaucrats have persuaded most loggers to despise and distrust environmentalists through a deliberate misinformation cam paign. Pages and pages of Bari’s book expose news blackouts, press lies, and FBI double dealing. The Klu Klux Klan, the U.S. Army, vigilante com m ittees, and right-wing religious nuts are ju st som e of those who have joined together to prevent Earth First! from trying to halt ecocide. W ho bom bed Judi Bari rem ains a mystery', but there is certainly no shortage of criminals who could have carried out the attack. Harassm ent, intimidation, d neats, misinformation, corruption and complicity were all blended with p remeditated physical violence to destroy the perceived ringleaders of the environmental m ovem ent. Even a 15-year-old boy who invited Bari to talk at his school received death threats.

The role of alternative media in publicizing such things, Bari concludes, is vital:

If an Earth First! demo happens in the forest and nobody writes about it, did it really exist? . . . When you look as bad as the timber industry, only a complete news blackout can help public opinion. It’s not surprising that an industry that would use assassination to suppress dissent would also use censorship. We can t depend on the corporate media to publicize our battles with the corporations. That’s why newspapers . . . are so important.


Eventually, the determ ination of Earth First! and the growing realization am ong timber workers that their jobs were doom ed


(clue to co rp o rate logging practices) led to Judi B ari’s gaining som e resp ect in logging com m unities. This was not due to ch an ce , but to contin u in g eiTorts by Bari and o th er IW W /Earth First! organizers. She organized an IWW union local in Fort Bragg with both tim ber workers and Earth First!ers as m em bers. She also officially rep resen ted five tim ber workers at an industrial tribunal after PCBs were dum ped on them at work. (Both the tim ber com pany and the w orkers’ sell-out AFL-GIO union tried to cover up the spill by saying that it was ju st m ineral oil.)

A Few Lessons

H ad tim ber w orkers form ed truly ind epen d en t unions, ecocatastrop he could have been avoided and logging regions might have been able to develop a sustainable resou rce base. U nfortunately, m ost o f the workers that did organize, organized against E arth First! and took part in their own industrial suicide. This tragic lack o f com m unication between G reens and workers is also a feature o f cu rren t tim ber wars in Australia, where union “leaders” (as in the U .S.A .) continue to tell workers that environm entalists will take their jobs from them . T o com b at this, we m ust en co u rag e the form ation of anarcho-syndicalist unions that will exp ose these lies and ensure the im plem entation of genuinely sustainable forestry practices. Bari pinpoints tam e business unionism and the lack o f industrial syndicalism as the m ost im p ortan t factors in the environm ental batde:

What is needed is some direction, and it’s certainly not coming from the AEL unions. Earth First! is still leading the batde in the woods, but Earth First! can only do so much because it is not a workers’ organization. Historically, it was the IWW who broke the stranglehold of the timber barons on the loggers and millworkers in the nineteen teens. The ruling class fought back with brutality, and eventually crushed the IWW, settling instead for the more cooperative business unions. Now the companies are back in total control, only this time they’re taking down not only the workers but the Earth as well. This, to me, is what the IWW-EarthFirst! link is really about.

Bari also subjects Earth First! as an organization to a g it at deal of criticism. She admits that h er “relationship with Earth First!, outside ‘E cotop ia’ [an autonom ous EF! affinity grou p ], has always been strained at best.” A large portion o f Timber Wars criticizes E F !’s co-founder, Dave Forem an, and the lack of understanding of labor issues within the organization. Forem an and Ed Abbey built up a highly individualistic, EF! m ountain m an im age, exemplified in Abbey’s influential novel, The Monkey Wrench Gang. It depicts eco-saboteurs within the con text o f a conventional adventure novel which reads m uch like a survivalist tract.

Forem an has always portrayed himself as a patriot and has claimed that “anarchists and class-struggle leftists have infiltrated EF! and led it away from its true purpose." Bari quotes extensively from Forem an ’s book, Confessions o f an Eco-Wamor, and is deeply critical of his reactionary social vision:

H e proudly calls lu m s d f a p atrio t and a R ep u b lican . His h e ro e s , m en tio n e d rep eated ly in bis b o ok , in clu d e w hite-m an land ta p ers like W ash in gton , Je ffe rs o n , and Jo h n A dam s instead o f b io ce n tris ts like C h ie f SeatU e o r V an dan a Sheeva. . . . ‘M ost p eo p le in this co u n try ,’ he says, ‘m yself in clu d ed , resp ect th e co n c e p t o f private p ro p erty .’ W ell, wait a m in u te . I f you really believe that n a tu re is n o t h ere to serve hu m ans, and hu m ans are m erely p art o f n a tu re , how can you su pport th e idea that hu m ans can ‘ow n’ th e E arth ?. . . F o re m a n ’s m iddle class bias is also show n in his co n te m p t fo r industrial w orkers: ‘W e are in co n sisten t w hen we castig ate [a tim ber baro n ] fo r destroying th e last w ilderness redw ood fo re s t, yet feel sym pathy fo r th e loggers w orking fo r h im ,’ h e says. . . . Now, I d o n ’t hold any ro m an tic views ab o u t the n o b le p ro le ta r ia t . . . [bu t] it seem s to m e that p e o p le ’s com p licity sh ou ld b e m easured m ore by the am o u n t o f co n tro l they have ov er th e co n d ition s o f th e ir lives than how dirty they get at work.

Bari denies, however, that Earth First! has becom e a traditional leftist organization, and she presents us with a vision similar to the social anarchism of Elisee Reclus, but which is instead inspired by the m odern biocentric philosophy of deep ecology:

It is w rong fo r Dave F o rem an to ch aracterize us sim ply as leftists o r a class struggle group. . . . [Socialist] th eo ries deal only with how to red istribu te th e spoils o f exp lo itin g the ea rth to b e n e f it a



d iffe re n t class o f hu m ans. W e n e ed to build a society that is no t based 011 th e e x p lo ita tio n o f th e E arth at all—a society w hose goal is to ach iev e a stab le sta le with n a tu re fo r the b e n efit o f all species.

Green Feminism

Bari is as m uch a G reen feminist as she is a Green syndicalist. In h er critique o f m em bers of the Earth First! old guard, she displays both social perspectives. She is convinced that Ed Abbey was not sensitive to w om en’s issues and bluntly states that his “retrogressive view of women as sex objects doesn’t make it” in the newly feminized Earth First! And she unequivocally dismisses the Earth First!jou rn al: “I’m absolutely clear that I’ve had it with the m ach o, beer-drinking, privileged bullshit it represents.”

Judi Bari is also an ardent proponent of abortion rights, and religious nuts and misogynist anti-environmentalists have sent her innum erable death threats and hale letters both before and after the car bombing. T he assassination attem pt on Bari, a woman with two children, drew a lot m ore women into the Redwood Sum m er protests than there might otherwise have been. After the attack on her, Bari states that at least 20 people assumed vital leadership positions, three-fourths of whom were women: “This is the fem inization of EF! Redwood Sum m er is an almost entirely wom en-led action."

T he necessity of organizing in both the community and the workplace is basic to the theory of social anarchism; and the involvem ent o f large num bers of women in the eco-defense m ovem ent, claims Bari, led to greater Earth First! involvement in logging com m unities. Isolated forest actions, in the absence of dialogue with progressive loggers, were therefore a tactical error on the part of the wider EF! movem ent:

E a rth First! was fo u n d e d by five m en , and its p rincipal spokes- p e o p le have all b e e n m ale. As in all such groups, th ere have always b e e n c o m p e te n t w om en d o in g real work beh in d the scenes. But th ey have b e e n virtually invisible b e h in d the p ublic EF! p erson a o f 'b ig m an g oes in to big w ilderness to save big trees. . . . Foi yeais th e strategy o f E F !, u n d er m ale leadersh ip , had b een based on indiv idual acts o f d aring . ‘N om adic A ction T eam s o f m aybe 10

p eo p le w ould travel to rem o te areas and b u iy them selves in logging roads, ch a in them selves to heavy e q u ip m en t, o r sit in trees. T h e r e w ere certain ly brave and p rin cip led w om en w ho e n g a g ed in these actio n s . . . bu t by and large, m ost o f the p eo p le w ho had the freed om for that kind o f travel and risk-taking w ere m en .I have n o th in g against individual acts o f d arin g , bu t th e flaw in this strategy is th e failu re to en g ag e in lon g-term co m m u n ity -based organizing. T h e r e is no way that a few iso lated individuals, 110 m atter how brave, can b rin g ab o u t th e massive socia l ch a n g e necessary lo save th e p lanet. So we began to o rg an ize w ith local p eo p le , p lan n in g o u r logging b lo ck ad es aro u n d issues th at had local com m unity support. W e also began to bu ild a llia n ces with progressive tim b er w orkers based 011 o u r co m m o n in terests ag a in st the big co rp o ratio n s. As o u r successes grew, m o re w om en an d m ore p eo p le with fam ilies and roots in the co m m u n ity b e g a n calling them selves E arth F irst!ers in o u r area.


The Question of Nonviolence

Given the need for comm unity support, the issue of n o n violence was critical to the success or failure of Redwood Sum mer. Nonviolence, however, works best when those in power obey the law (consider the Tienanm en Square m assacre), and Bari admits that this was a real problem:

N obody ever said law en fo rcem ^ rtiftn M en d o C oun ty was fail o r logical. T h e p roblem is though, that so m etim es th ese s itu ation s can be deadly. . . . W e need equ al p ro tectio n o f th e law in this highly volatile struggle. W e ’re n o nv io len t, bu t [w e’re ] n o t g o in g to go away and let the trees go down. . . . As o u r ex p o su re and in flu en ce grew, so did th e use o f v io len ce to rep ress us. A nd in this far-flung, rural, tim b er-d ep en d en t area , it was easy to g et away with. At o n e d em o n stration an angry lo g g er p u n ch ed a 50-year-old no nv io len t w om an so hard that she was k n o ck ed co ld an d h e r nose was b io k e n . In a n o th e r in cid en t, my car was ram m ed fro m b eh ind K aren Silkw ood style by the sam e logging tru ck th a t we had b lockaded less than 2 4 hou rs earlier. My ca r was to ta led and my ch ild ien and I and the o th e r E arth F irstlers w ho w ere rid in g with us ended up in the hospital. In b o th these cases, as in o th e r incid ents o f v iolence against us, local p o lice refused to arrest, prosecu te , o r even investigate o u r assaulters. E arth First! had n e v er


initiated any violence throughout all of this. But neither did we publicly associate our movement with an overt nonviolence code. Alter all, that would contradict the he-man image that EF! was founded upon. Yet I did not see how we could face the increasingly volatile situation on the front lines without declaring and enforcing our nonviolence.

Bari is very certain about where she stands on terrorist violence. If you had nearly been killed and were left crippled for life by an act o f terrorism , you too would certainly have strong views on the subject. Given what she has gone through, Bari deserves to be heard. She understands that nonviolence can in certain instances be unrealistic and ineffective. But she insists that terrorism o f the sort directed against her is totally unacceptable:

I had a discussion with somebody a week before the bombing and I told him that I considered nonviolence to be the only appropriate tactic in our country at this time, but that I considered it only a tactic. I wasn’t a Ghandian who considered nonviolence to be the only way ever. I would never tell a Salvadoran to use nonviolence only. And he replied with an answer that has played out in my mind a thousand times since then. He said, Your belief in nonviolence as a tactic only will not sustain you through the hatred you’re going to experience this summer.’ I realize that I forgave the person who ran me off the road with the logging truck last summer in that he was victim who took his anger out on the wrong person. I could see thfMKiout him. They hauled him out of his truck and made him confront me, and I could see that he was horrified at what he had done. When he saw that my children were in the car too, he kept saying, ‘the children, the children, I didn’t see the children.’ But the person who bombed me was a monster. I’ve been unable to understand how somebody would deliberately, coldly and premeditatedly try to kill me knowing that I have small children and I’m their sole support. And what I realized about myself. . . is that if you gave me the same bomb I don’t have it in me to do it back to him. What I have discovered is that there’s a level of violence, there's a level of terrorism that s really unacceptable to me. . . . I think that the problem isn t just the economic system, isn’t just the social relations, I think that part of the problem is the violence in the society.

Nonviolence may indeed by the m ost appropriate way to defend a vulnerable Earth from a violent society. But what kind of society do we wish to create in its place? And what spciifii conclusions can we draw from the I inibei W ais ? 1 lit i'ust is that successful eco-defense must be com m unity based. H eroic individual acts are not in themselves sufficient to stop environmental degradation, and may in fact, in the absence of comm unity support, (further) alienate local people. 1 he second lesson is that workplace organization is the m ost effective co m munity base for eco-defense. Bari realized this and, before the car bombing, was working to organize tim ber workers as well as to organize eco-defensive actions for the Redwood Sum m er campaign. The timber com panies also realized the im portan ce o f worker organizing in eco-defense—which is alm ost certainly why they attem pted to m urder Judi Bari.

No one can read the future. Anarchists m erely point out their ideals, defending their integrity of vision while fervently hoping that as little blood as possible will be shed in the com ing social and ecological revolution. Thousands of anarchists have m et untimely and horrible ends at the hands of state/cap italist jailors merely for expressing verbal opposition. Anarchists are n ot naive about the possibility of the absolute military or c o rp o ra te / technological destruction of the entire hum an project, the destruction of our species. They appreciate the fact that on ce the battle between nature and the people on the one hand, and capital and state on the other, is raging, all of us will necessarily be forced to take sides, and perhaps to take up arm s as well— though under present circum stances, at least in the industrialized world, taking up arms would be inappropriate, ineffective, and likely to do far m ore harm than good. (See You C an ’t Blow Up a Social Relationship, by anonymous Australian anarchists, and published by See Sharp Press, for further discussion o f the political use of violence.) Peace, however, may becom e only an ideal, and not a realistic option, in an ecological “war.” This “w ar” has already begun, and both sides are preparing for a battle between life and death upon planet Earth.


Anarchist Society 8c Its

Practical Realization

The Historical Failure of Marxist Communism

T he recen t political and social changes in Eastern Europe have shown us that the m arxist experim ent with centrally imposed, authoritarian state socialism has been a tragic failure in both econ om ic and hum an terms. Even persons who are hardened and relatively indifferent to the general welfare have been disgusted by the corrup tion , bankruptcy and sheer moral rottenness of the dictatorial state-com m unist system.

T h at the era o f m arxist “com m unism ” has ended is beyond dispute. T he people o f East Germany literally voted with their feet. L ured by the prom ise o f jobs, departm ent stores, Sony TVs and M ercedes cars, they crossed the border to the West at a phen om en al rate. Separated by a wall of ignorance for so many years, the peoples o f the form er eastern bloc were naively convinced that the limited freedom s offered by western-style liberal d em ocracy would somehow solve the many problems they faced. As they’ve since learned, nothing could have been further from the truth. As we approach a new millennium, we are su rrou n ded by a multitude of seemingly incurable social and environm ental problem s—global in nature—which capitalism and parliam entary dem ocracy are unable to solve. Beyond this, the so- called liberal d em ocratic state, newly equipped with terrifyingly efficient m ethods of centralized social and informadon m anagem ent, can be but a fragile guarantee of freedom and continued progress for the broad masses of people.

Despite the internal disintegration of international co m munism, coupled with the em ergence of a ' grass roots’ and overdy radical ecology m ovem ent (which owes little 01 nothing to marxist ideology), a significant sector of the o rg a n i/id l< It appears unable to reject a narrow, outdated, m echanistic marxism. The “com m unist" states produced ecological destruction much worse than that in the western capitalist states, and certainly failed to guarantee human liberty and self-determ ination. If we are to convince people of the desirability of non-exploitative, n on capitalist social relationships, we must develop a language and a program that draws upon socialist traditions o th er than those of marxist com m unism . Social anarchism is prom inent am on g these alternative traditions of revolutionary social organization and reconstruction.

Anarchism as an organized political force holds as its ideal the attainm ent of a rationally conceived, ecologically harm onious, non-exploitadve and non-capitalist social system. A narchism , however, unlike all other progressive political, social, an d eco nomic philosophies, regards the state in all its form s as an inherently corrupt, hierarchical, authoritarian and unworkably bureaucratic mode of social control that is incom patible with, indeed inimical to, the practical realization of a sane, just, and ecologically integrated society. Social anarchists, unlike m arxist communists, do not seek to impose socialist concepts upon the people from above by means of centralized state structures. They hope, rather, that the people, in an attem pt to p rod uce a self- managed, direcdy dem ocratic, and ecologically sustainable social system, will organize themselves from the bottom upwards—at the level of individual comm unities, interest groups, and w orkers’ organizations.

W hether or not you agree with anarchists in believing that genuine social change in the direction of a socialist-ecological society can only com e about with the destruction of centralized bureaucratic m ism anagem ent, it is abundantly evident that the marxist attem pt to impose socialism from above has been a tragic failure. The marxist-communist con cept of the “dictatorship of the proletariat or workers’ state" has always been realized as the absolute dictatorship of the Com m unist Party—that is, dictatorship pure and simple. 7 his is a very well proven historical fact.

140 Anarchism & Environmental Survival


The Place of the Nation State in Social Evolution

A ccording to archeological and anthropological evidence, hum ans have never lived as isolated, solitary beings. T here were, of course, always outcasts and hermits who preferred or were forced to live alone; such people, however, have been the excep tion rath er than the rule (like the rogue elephant or the lone d olphin). Hum ans, like so many animals (from elephants to m onkeys), have evolved into socially com plex and intensely sexual beings. Partly from the needs of survival and partly from the need to feel the touch o f o th er kindred living beings, the human species has socially co-evolved in the most intimate fashion. Em pirical evidence from the study of monkeys and apes assures us that ou r species was social before it was hum an. Thus, governm ent as such is a quite recen t social invention. History shows us that hum ans have lived for tens of thousands of years without feeling the least need for governm ent. The nadon state is thus an astoundingly recen t social-evolutionary event. Any [Australian] aboriginal will affirm that this is so.

As the creationist mythology has been superseded by the theory o f evolution, we have becom e aware that we are the p rod uct o f a bio-evolutionary process in which nothing is p erm an en t and everything is in a state of flux. As with biological evolution, the developm ent of society (social evoluuon) has been a process o f continuous adaptation, r/evoludon and modification. T he Stone Age, the Agricultural Revolution, the Bronze Age, the Industrial Revolution, the Com m unications Revolution, and the Reproductive Revolution are all stages in a dynamic and ever- ch anging social-evolutionary process.

As conscious beings, we can choose our collective social- evolutionary destiny. As a species we collectively engineered our social and political institutions, so it stands to reason that representative governm ent and the nation state represent only one o f m any possible m odes of social organization.

W e as a species constructed the institutions of government and state, and likewise we can dismantle them. We can replace them with b etter forms of social organization, forms that do not rely upon constituted authority and large and inefficient centralized

bureaucracies. Evolution is an ever-open book, and the nadon state, which has been with us only a few thousand years, is but a small paragraph in a long and ever-changing story.

The future of our planet and ou r continued evolution are under grave threat. Im portant social r/evolutionary' choices must be made. The nation state has not been particularly successful in solving the enorm ous social and environm ental problem s we face, nor have governm ents solved the problem s of violence and war. (Indeed, until quite recently the Russian and A m erican governments were threatening to blow one an oth er up with nuclear missiles and probably destroy the entire ecosystem of ou r planet in the process.) Governm ents have consistently failed to preserve the integrity of our soils, rivers and forests. T he im perialist empires of the last few centuries, for exam ple—the m ost extensive form of state exploitation and dom ination yet known—inflicted irreparable environm ental dam age not merely upon particular ecological regions, but upon entire continents. T he introduction of new animals ill suited to the prevailing ecology, and the exploitation of local bio-resources—fertile lands, forests, gam e, etc.—to provide raw materials for the short-term benefit o f distant imperial states, has resulted in huge tracts of land being turned into pitiful deserts.

If humanity is to survive, we must stop blindly placing ou r faith in government. The continued evolution of our species can no longer be left in the hands of official bunglers. Only the people at the level of the individual household, factory, and com m unity can initiate the social-ecological r/evolu tion . The state has always been a mechanism which supports the rich and powerful who, far from being interested in the future of our species and ou r planet, are interested only in their own wealth and self-aggrandizem ent.

A social and political organization lasts as long as the people are willing to abide it. Within reason, any social system, no m atter how vicious, destructive or stupid (apartheid o r Nazism, for exam ple), is workable in the short term if enough people believe in it. But if enough people are convinced of the desirability of organizing society on a nongovernm ental basis, then anarchism , as an organized social force, becom es a realizable social-evolutionary choice every bit as practical as centralized governm ent and the nation state.



Anarchism, the State 8c the Technological Revolution

Most people are indoctrinated from the cradle to the grave to regard governm ent as the source of all social order. Despite the many hours on television and the many pages in our newspapers devoted to political issues, the media has never deem ed it interesting or relevant to ask the question: Is Government Necessary ? Despite all the corruption, silly disputes, unnecessary secrecy, bureaucratic ineptness, and sheer dishonesty which have always accom p an ied parliam entary politicking, the media continually glorifies the state—producing an endless stream of overtly stadst propaganda thinly veiled with a nauseating display of shallow patriotism (as during the 1991 Gtdf W ar). Media representatives constantly hound governm ent leaders and officials, pouncing like dogs at the d inner table upon every dropped word, and they fill their news and opinion colum ns with the dreary details of petty party intrigues.

People raised from birth to regard governm ent as a natural and essential part o f the social ord er are not surprisingly a bit bewildered when confronted with the idea of running our social and political affairs without it. “Surely,” they object, “the abolition of governm ent would result in the destruction of organized social life and simply result in chaos!?”

In fact, it wotddn’t. N ongovernm ental organization is a normal part of everyday social life. W hether governm ent exists or not, people can n ot help but develop com plex patterns of social organization. For every hum an need or interest, you can guarantee that som e form of social organization will spontaneously em erge in o rd er to serve it—usually with no connection to governm ent. Babysitting networks, trade unions, horticultural associations, hobby groups, volunteer fire departm ents, and the Red Cross are ju st a few exam ples from the multitude of voluntary social organizations which developed independently of governm en t in o rd er to serve social needs. Many of these spontaneously evolved social organizations rem ain local or last but a few weeks o r m onths to m eet the needs of the m om ent. Others assume a m ore p erm an en t ch aracter, and some develop an international ch aracter. In fact, there is an enorm ous pool of nongovernmental

144 Anarchism 8c Environmental Survival

forms of association and organization which could be developed to serve virtually every hum an need and inteiest. (O l course, voluntary organizations are not m eeting all social needs at present, and almost certainly cannot do so while capitalism endures. This is due in large part to the grossly inequitable distribution of wealth and incom e in capitalist slates, and to tlu truly staggering am ounts of money siphoned oil by governm ents.)

No single centralized national or international govei n m en t can ever hope to consider, let alone adequately deal with, the immense diversity of human needs and con cern s. A group ol a few hundred people passing laws and resolutions on pig farm ing one day, reproductive technology the next, and public highways the day after, without any of the legislators ever having m anaged a pig farm, engaged in medical or reproductive research , o r built a road, is, in our m odern, com plex society, simply an absurdity.

Social anarchism does not imply the absence of organization. Anarchists simply want to remove centralized governm ental organization and coercive authority. Although anarchists will not accept the irrational authority of a handful o f politicians (whose only experdse is in the acquisition of prestige and pow er), anarchists, like humanity’s tribal ancestors, respect the rational authority of the expert. If one wishes to learn about wine m aking, one approaches the workers of the wine-making industries—and respects their experdse in m atters of wine making.

Placed as we are at the advent of the technological, com p u ter, and com m unications revolution, we need to forget childish conceptions of parliamentary governm ent. They belong to a past era. For we are entering the information age—an age in which billions upon billions of bits of data con cern in g all things imaginable whiz hourly around our globe. A technological- com m unicadons revolution in which there is the cooperative interchange of views, information, and expertise in all areas of human interest, without the interference of governm ent, will bring changes that we are only beginning to fully appreciate.

Instead of placing our faith in burdensom e, inefficient, and overly centralized parliamentary bodies as we do at present, social anarchists urge that we create a society which is adm inistered by a multitude of separate organizational bodies: education groups for the furtherance of study; environmental groups for the preser

vation and m an agem ent of natural wilderness; organizations for the protection o f hum an liberties and for the prom otion of peace and arbitration; industrial workers unions representing every conceivable trade and industry; statistical accountancy associations for the m an agem en t and rational allocation of scarce resources— all o f which will work together in their particular fields of activity, both locally and globally, for a better, healthier, greener and m ore rationally self-administered society.

New technology has, however, also placed enorm ous and terrifyingly powerful tools in the hands of the state. Already the governm ent is insanely attem pting to administer society through massive central com puters (e.g ., Social Security, the 1RS, etc.). T he state, in its desire to centrally and hierarchically administer an incredibly large num ber o f people in an ever m ore com plex society, has had to resort to ever m ore sophisticated com puters which place enorm ous quantities o f information and power in the hands of fewer and fewer people. Huge and powerful com puter banks (with inform ation on everyone and with little or no public access) are not ordy inefficient in that they obviously fail to take into acco u n t the variety and com plexity of hum an life, but dangerous in that the potential for misuse of their information on a vast scale by tyrannical political elites is simply terrifying.

Anarchists ab hor this dangerous development and argue for the com puter-assisted m anagem ent of things rather than people. Anarchists m aintain that the technological/com m unications revolution m ust be used for the benefit of all humankind. They want a free and openly com m unicating society in which a multitude of specialist organizations will federate and cooperate with one an oth er for the realization of a better, self-administered society.

Big B roth er or social anarchism —this is the choice which confronts us. W e the people must decide the course of the social- technological r/evolu tion .

Anarchism, the State & the Social-Ecological Revolution

Environm entalism is at the forefront of current political and social debate. Even previously com m itted nature haters such as M argaret T h atch er have, in an effort to capture the Green vote,


begun to give lip service to environm entalism . Politicians have begun to hug trees rather than babies at election time.

G overnm ent, however, will have no place in the forth com in g social-ecological revolution. Even now, under the th ica t of ecological disaster, it Likes the bravado o f a few com m itted environmentalists in nongovernm ental and nonparty organizations such as G reenpeace to pressure the governm ent to reluctantly enforce the few paltry regulations on the books.

W hen the masses of ordinary people have perceived the necessity of changing the course of social evolution, governm ents of all types have always proven inadequate. Even the m ost “progressive” of governm ents, because of their very structure, are capable only of dull, slow, and bureaucratically tortuous reformism. Placed as we are now at the brink of the social- ecological revolution, it is obvious that the governm ental system will never be able to keep abreast with the dem ands o f the people. The wholesale “greening" of nations can n o t be acco m plished by a few hundred politicians sitting in legislative halls.

The people, perceiving that governm ent is incapable of fostering the great environm ental and social changes n eeded to ensure their continued survival, must begin to form their own groups and organizations. People in their n eighborhoods and suburbs should set up recycling depots and com m un al composting sites without waiting for governm ent “approval.” Workers, through their unions, should boycott the use or reckless disposal of dangerous substances and im plem ent new er and safer techniques without waiting for the governm ent to pass new “industrial regulations” or for their employers to ch an ge their ways. We must begin to organize ourselves without paying h eed to what the governm ent may or may not say. If we do, the fall of governm ent and the nation state becom es inevitable.

As the social-ecological revolution progresses, people will begin to organize themselves not according to electoral and state boundaries, but rather according to natural geographical and ecological ones. Electoral and state boundaries, being artificial creations unrelated to naturally occurring boundaries, will be completely useless in the forthcom ing social-ecological revolution. (When the English army invaded and colonized Australia it divided the co u n try -m o re or less with a ruler and a pencil on a



piece o f paper—into six separate states. W hat im pudence! What stupidity! T o defy millions of years of evoludon and draw a straight line through a desert or a forest and call this half W estern Australia, this half the N orthern Territory!)

T he existence of a huge num ber of disdnct and unique ecological regions and sub-regions with their own special mixtures of flora and fauna is som ething that the nation-state system, born of Caesarism and imperialist conquest, has largely failed to recognize. T he people, anxious to p rotect the biological integrity of the region in which they live and bring up their families, rather than relying on the orders of som e distant governm ent, will themselves begin to repair the dam age caused by reckless capitalist exploitation and by centuries of imperialism. The social-ecological revolution thus implies anarchy. For in the new age of ecological radicalism and biological realism, the political boundaries of the statist era will necessarily be replaced by natural, ecological ones.

This will not simply be a “retribalizadon” of humanity—for we can never return to a past age. Besides, the hum an species is at last beginning to think in global terms. “Think globally, act locally!” is the slogan of the 1990s. The need for clean air, and the in tercontinental migration of bird and m arine life, show us that the disdnct ecological regions are not closed endues. The wellbeing of any ecological region, however unique or isolated (e .g ., a South Pacific atoll), is dependent upon die wellbeing of all the others. O ne hopes that the people of each ecological region will quickly realize that in addition to striving to ensure their own wellbeing, they must also strive to take a responsible place in a com p lex, global federation of environmental forces.

T he ecological-anarchist approach to global environmental problem s is to save the whole by saving the parts. Social anarchists en co u rage people to stop relying upon governm ent to solve their problem s and to realize that they have much influence in their own n eighborhoods. Eco-anarchists claim that the only radonal ap proach to planetary bio-federation and environmental stability is to persuade people to deeply idendfy with the natural ecology o f their local place and to p rotect that place while developing industrial and agricultural practices that are adapted to its ecological characteristics. If this were to happen in every natural region , argues the anarchist-ecologist, then the planet as a whole


would be m uch better protected against the destructiveness of our present social system, and that system would alm ost certainly bereplaced in short order.

A global federation of ecological regions will necessarily be nonhierarchical, for it is impossible to rank die \alut ol one ecological region above another. Each may have an unforeseen and significant role to play in ensuring the long-term ecological stability o f ou r planet. Yet. at present, som e regions are relatively well protected while others arc ruthlessly exploited. How can it be that the environm ent of Yellowstone Park is m ore im portant than that o f a “national sacrifice area"? (T he U.S. governm ent has deliberately destroyed— mostly through its n uclear p rogram s a num ber of natural regions in pursuit of its national security interests. Governm ent bureaucrats refer to these devastated regions as “national sacrifice areas.”)

Clearly, governm ent can have no part in the forth com in g social-ecological revolution.

Anarchism, Social Revolution & the Free City Commune

When anarchists speak of the destruction of the nation state, people often assume that they're advocating a return to small scale village or comm unity life. Although anarchists would certainly like to see villages and towns becom e ind epen d en t and self-governing, a return to a small scale, essentially isolated com munal lifestyle on a mass scale is both repugnant and implausible. Anarchism is not a backward-looking, pre-industrial ideology. Even though the developm ent of fast and efficient transport anti com m unication systems has eliminated the need to live in larger and larger cities, when anarchists speak of the destruction o f the state they are not prom oting small, isolated com m unities.

W hat they are prom oting is the destruction of empire-style organization; and there are assuredly em pires within em pires. Much as imperialism is the control of foreign lands by an alien and centralized entity, the nation state itself is a m ini-em pire. Each national governm ent is situated like a spider in its web, ruling the most distant cities and townships from C anberra, Paris or Berlin. Is this a necessary or, indeed, even a practical way to


organize society? Social anarchists argue that it is not necessary, and not even very practical, and that the primary, natural unit of social life ought to be the free, independent, self-governing city.

With the destruction o f the nation state during the social revolution, the people themselves will begin to administer the affairs o f their cities. Just as people arc beginning to consider themselves inhabitants of distinct ecological regions, they will likewise com e to consider themselves not as subjects of the nation state, but as equal citizens o f a particular town or city. The people of each city, free of the torpor of centralized, bureaucratic m ism anagem ent, will assume a new sense of civic responsibility. R ather than wait for directives from the capital or city hall, they will m eet in their workplaces and neighborhoods to discuss the problem s of the day and to decide what to do about them. The dism antling of state-centralism will initiate a flourishing of civic involvement such as has not been seen since the decline of the an cien t Greek or the medieval European cities, when each city considered itself a sovereign entity—independent, self-governing, and answerable to no one. The citizens of the cities will no longer regard themselves as belonging to a particular state, but to a particular city with its unique history, traditions, trades, and arch itectu re—a city situated, m oreover, in a distinct ecological region which needs their vigilant care.

As the com m un al revolution progresses and the people of each city develop an ever-deepening sense of civic identity, the whole geography o f the liberated city will begin to change. The city’s districts and suburbs, instead of being powerless and centrally dom inated units in an undifferentiated urban sprawl, will becom e in d epen d en t and vital urban com m unities. In an effort to becom e self-sustaining and to prevent the degradation of the countryside, the city’s people, in cooperation with rural people in the surrou n ding ecoreg ion , will dispense with outdated, environmentally unhealthy form s o f m onocultural agriculture and instead implem en t local, organ ic, and community-based forms of agroindustrial production . T he citizens of each urban district will themselves b ecom e responsible for m eeting their municipal and civic needs—housing, health, settling local conflicts, entertainm en t, prim ary education , childcare, and a host of other things. Thus, social anarchists hope to replace the nation state with a

large num ber of agro-industrial city com m unes, that is, an agglom eration of federated, yet independent, townships.

Despite inevitable conflicts between opposing factions and districts, the necessity of sustaining a sense o f civic unity and purpose will ensure that for the most part disputes will be p eacefully settled. A self-governing and sovereign city freed from external state interference must, as a m atter of necessity, resolve its own problems. Everyone needs safe streets, shelter, food, entertainm ent and reladve peace, so it is in the interests o f every citizen to sustain an active, healthy city—a city which provides plentiful, high quality food, that is sustainably integrated with its surrounding bioregions, and whose arch itectu re, landscaping, parks, and vitality provide sustenance and wonder.

This does not imply a return to the Dark Ages, when each city was surrounded by fortifications and essentially isolated. For this dates from a time when it took many days on horseback to travel from city to city. Fast and efficient transport and com m unications networks will never allow a return to that era. O f necessity, cities will federate with one an oth er on the basis o f culture, ecology, trade, industry, and location in ord er to secure inform ation, goods, and services which are universally required but not readily available in particular cities or com m unes.

The forthcom ing social anarchist revolution will be a com m un - alist one—not a m ere coup d ’etat or the transfer o f pow er to a new Caesar, general, or political party. The revolution will be decentralized and have thousands upon thousands of cen ters. The citizens of every city, town, and suburb will themselves set about reconstructing a pleasant, safe and ecologically sustainable civic community out of the ruins of the past state-capitalist era.

Anarchism, Social Revolution & Trade Unionism

Social anarchists, in both theory and practice, have always acknowledged the necessity of working class or trade union organization. However, when social anarchists talk about w orkers’ organization, they do not speak in favor of the large-scale, centralized, and bureaucratic union structures of the present day. Such organizations are for the most part puppy dogs in the laps



of governm ents and corporations—“negotiating“ in the most servile fashion with our state-capitalist oppressors for the right to rem ain wage slaves and to earn a couple m ore lousy bucks a day (o r, m ore recently, “negotiating" for our right to earn a couple less lousy bucks a day). A centralized, bureaucratic trade union organization whose en tren ch ed , privileged leaders no longer participate in the day-to-day work of the factory, farm or workshop, can never represent working people or even begin to successfully utilize the im m ense social potential of grassroots working class organization.

Obviously, this kind “unionism" has no place in any anarchist society. For the workers in every farm, factory, workshop, or home will have to lake ch arge of production themselves. Engineers, researchers, m achine operators, apprendces, et al., will have to coop erate am on g themselves, not for the benefit of a handful of capitalists or state officials, but for the direct benefit of themselves, their families, their industry, their city, and humanity as a whole. Realizing that a particular plant or workshop cannot organize an entire industry, the workers in each farm or factory will federate with others in their trade in ord er to administer and regulate their collective affairs. T he trade union will, as a m atter of logic, cease being a bureaucratic, centralized body com posed of a mass of passive “m em bers” controlled by a privileged hierarchy devoted to m aintaining the em ployer/em ployee dictatorship—and their own privileged positions. The union will becom e, rath er, an organization com posed of all the m em bers of a p articular trade who will be collectively and publicly entrusted with the p rop er functioning and developm ent of their industry.

Individual trade unions will directly represent their workers when discussing econ om ic issues with unions in oth er industries. They will be responsible to the general public—constandy informing the people o f working conditions, trends, research developm ents, environm ental safety, and oth er matters of interest. In o rd er to preven t the form ation of perm anent bureaucracies and u n d em ocratic p roced ures within these potentially all-powerful eco n o m ic organizations, anarchists stress several safeguards: the d em ocratic election o f adm inistrators by those they represent; the rotation o f administrative positions, with office holders returning directly to the w orkforce after a predeterm ined period of time;

and, im portantly, making everyone in administrative positions subje c t to im m ediate recall by those who elected them .

W orking people, kept until now in servitude to capital and the state, are, in reality, the producers of all social wealth. All things essential to our day-to-day existence and continued survival food, energy, transport, water, sanitation, etc. are the products ol hum an labor and natural resources which are (o r should be) the heritage of all hum ankind. O nce freed from working for the benefit of the few rather than the many, working people will quickly realize their true worth to society, which is cleverly hidden from them through a perverse social status hierarchy in which the r ich -th a t is, those who live off the labor o f oth ers—have m uch higher status than those who perform useful work. (In fact, in ou r perverse society, the m ore useful the work, the lower its social status and pay seem to be—the jobs of garbage co llector and childcare worker being cases in point.) O n ce freed from working to enrich the parasitic class, working people will soon acquire a new sense of independence, pride and self-worth, and their unions will serve both themselves and humanity.

The fact that trade unions arc universal in ch aracter and not linked to a particular city or com m une makes them ideal vehicles for a host of econom ically viud inter-com m unal activities. Anarchists believe that workers, through their unions, will ensure the equitable distribution of essential goods and services, som e of which may be unobtainable at the level of the individual co m mune or city (e.g., coal and natural gas arc found in only a few locations, but are required by people in alm ost all lo catio n s).

It is clear that if anarchists arc to have any ch an ce of realizing their goal of a stateless social order, then ordinary working people must develop nonbureaucratic and directly d em ocratic form s of agro-industrial organization in advance o f the revolutionary moment, capable of ensuring that vital services function efficiently in the absence of state-capitalist control. In ord er for the social-anarchist revolution to succeed, the trains, buses, mines, telephones, e tc., must continue to operate from the m om ent the state-capitalist order begins to disintegrate. W ithout agro-industrial working class or trade union organization, revolutionary anarchism will rem ain an intellectual fantasy and philosophical pipe dream .



Anarchism 8c Revolution

G overnm ent will always be in perm anent opposition to social evolutionary progress. In times o f revolution, governm ent will always attem pt to stem the tide o f social progress and will never keep abreast of popular dem ands. For governm ent to do so would be con trary to its static, bureaucratic nature. Revolutions always involve the overthrow o f the governm ent of the day!

Having destroyed governm ent in the revolutionary act, why then constitute an oth er, as the marxists suggest? History has shown that attem pts to create “workers’ states” have always resulted in the developm ent o f vicious, totalitarian, bureaucratic police states. Revolution and governm ent are in com p atib le- opposite and inimical to one another. The idea of a “revolutionary govern m en t” that will consolidate and further the revolutionary process is nonsensical. The reconstruction of governm ent during the revolutionary process represents reaction and the end o f revolution. W e must break the cycle of governmental “revolutions" and em bark upon the course of social revolutionary anarchism —the social construction of a rationally conceived, selforganized society in the absence of the nation state.

Revolution is a com p lex social phenom enon that is born of the people and which is a natural part of biological and social evolution. C enturies o f oppression, injustice, and indoctrination have slowed the onset of revolution. But it will com e. Through the long, dark centuries, there has been slow, painful progress; and it appears to be accelerating. Revolution is an accelerated social evolutionary process which involves the rapid modification o r rep lacem en t o f outdated social, political, econom ic, and ecological structures. Such transform ations can never be the work o f a single brain or o f a schem e imposed from above through govern m en t. Revolutionary transform ation involves the whole of society—n ot ju st a ch ange of personnel in the controlling apparatus. A revolution must occu r in every ham let, village, town and province, however distant or rem ote. Revolution is the result o f billions upon billions of revolutionary actions by millions upon millions of separate people, all of whom are striving, however vaguely, toward a new social order.

Revolution involves local action, the people in every stieet, park, suburb, farm , factory and workshop m eeting to discuss events and to make collective decisions. It also involves direct physical actions such as the planting ol trees, gardens, and fields, and the devising o f new, nonpolluting and ecologically integrated ways of m eeting hum anity’s many needs. T he biosocial reintegration of hum ankind with nature and the developm ent of genuinely dem ocratic forms of political organization can only occu r at the local level—at the level of each city and ecological region. Revolution, if it is to be successful, implies that millions of people take direct revolutionary action in their im m ediate locales, where only they can effect real and lasting political, econom ic, and ecological change. The im m ense social-ecological reconstruction of our planet can never be the residt o f dictatorship, bureaucratic reformism, or parliamentary politicking. It will be the social-r/cvolutionary product o f countless individuals, of humanity as a whole.

The nation state is a cum bersom e and unnecessary leftover from an imperialist and profoundly anti-ecological era, capable only of supporting its own bureaucracies, m ultinational capitalist exploitation, and the privileges of the rich and powerful. L et us destroy the outdated m onum ents of the state-governm ental period and through our unions, com m unities, and federations build a better, safer, greener, and m ore socially equitable world. Let us no longer place our faith in politicians who are only interested in dull reformism and self-aggrandizem ent, and place our faith instead in Anarchy—and in the ability of ordinary people to follow their own social evolutionary course and to con stru ct a world capable of ensuring our species’ continued survival.

The future ol our planet is in our hands. We the people have the power to avert the.social-ecological disaster that threatens us. To rely upon governm ent—or god—is foolish and irresponsible. l'here is no god, no personal savior, no man on a white horse. Let us save ourselves!

154 Anarchism 8c Environmental Smvival

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P e n ^ i n ^ g ^ 317’ ^ V,ndlcatwn ° f lhe Rights o f Women. New York: Viking

^ s Ä s s ^ r ’' Bl0W UP a S0Cial RelationshiP- San Francisco: See

In this wide-ranging book, Graham Purchase, one of the anarchist movement's leading young theoreticians, graphically demonstrates the relation of classical libertarian 'thought to the most pressing issues on the Green

agenda:

• Bioregionalism• Overpopulation• Feminism• Sustainable Agriculture• Animal Rights• Technology• Wilderness Preservation

• Social Ecology• Eco-Defense

p . -A * • ^

This book is not, however, a collection of dry, academic essays. Purchase's uncompromising approach

and acerbic comments ensure that Anarchism & Environmental Survival will be one of the most controversial environmental books of the 1990s.

ISBN 0-9613289-8-3

50

9 78096 32 и

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